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REPRESSED EMOTIONS 






BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR 



Religion and Medicine (co-author) 

Abnormal Psychology 

The Meaning of Dreams 

What is Psychoanalysis? 

The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth 



REPRESSED 
EMOTIONS 



BY 

ISADOR H. CORIAT, M.D. 

Author of "What is Psychoanalysis?" 
"Abnormal Psychology," etc. 




NEW YORK 

BKENTANO'S 

PUBLISHERS 



■ Li* 



Copyright, 1920, by 
BRENTANO'S 



All rights reserved 



NOV -4 1920 
"©CU 6 0138a 



TO MY WIFE 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGE 

Introduction . 1 

I The Meaning of Repressed Emotion . 7 

II Repressed Emotions in Primitive Soci- 
ety 58 

III Repressed Emotions in Literature . . 88 

IV The Sublimation of Repressed Emo- 

tions 138 

V The Development of Psychoanalysis . 164 

VI The Depth of the Unconscious . .184 

VII A Fairy Tale from the Unconscious . 194 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 



INTRODUCTION 

Psychology in both its academic and 
practical aspects is now at the parting of the 
ways and the immediate future will deter- 
mine whether it shall remain unproductive 
or become an instrument of practical impor- 
tance in the guidance of human interests. 
As Harvey, by training, a physician, dis- 
covered the circulation of the blood and so 
made modern physiology possible, so Freud, 
also trained as a physician has devised new 
avenues of approach to the understanding 
of the human mind through the conceptions 
of psychoanalysis. 

There is a strange but perfectly natural 
analogy between the utterances of a seven- 
teenth century scientist and that of a twenti- 
eth in the consciousness that each has per- 
ceived the inner meaning of his great dis- 
covery. Harvey states for instance, — "But 
what remains to be said upon the quantity 

[i] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

and source of the blood which thus passes, 
is of so novel and unheard-of character, that 
I not only fear injury to myself from the 
envy of the few, but I tremble lest I have 
mankind at large for my enemies, so much 
doth want and custom, that become as an- 
other nature, and doctrine once sown and 
that hath struck deep root, and respect for 
antiquity influence all men. Still the die is 
cast, and my trust is in my love of truth, and 
the candor that inheres in cultivated minds." 
Three centuries later Freud was led to make 
a similar statement, with a scientific candor 
which showed his profundity of mind and 
his sincerity of purpose. "In my continued 
occupation with the problems considered 
therein, for the study of which my practice 
as a psychotherapeutist affords me much op- 
portunity, I found nothing that would com- 
pel me to change or improve my ideas. I 
can therefore peacefully wait until the read- 
er's comprehension has risen to my level, or 

[2] 



INTRODUCTION 

until an intelligent critic has pointed out to 
me the basic faults in my conception." 

Psychoanalysis has shown that what is 
termed "abnormal" is merely an exaggera- 
tion of certain traits as they manifest them- 
selves in everyday life, for instance, the for- 
getting of familiar words has the same mech- 
anism as the repressions in the neuroses. The 
psychoanalytic concept of the unconscious is 
unique, since it demonstrates that all the 
facts of consciousness cannot be gathered by 
mere experimental introspection in the lab- 
oratory and that the so-called free associa- 
tions, on which experimental psychology has 
laid so much stress, are not free at all, but 
are definitely motivated by either antecedent 
experiences or unconscious mechanisms. It 
is this theory of psychical determinism which 
explains not only the psychology of every- 
day life, but also dreams and neurotic mani- 
festations. Various mental concepts such 
as determinism, the displacement of the emo- 

[3] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

tions, the dynamic pature of the mental pro- 
cesses, repression, the wish as the key to con- 
scious and unconscious thinking, the various 
levels of the unconscious, are thus clearly ex- 
plained for the first time through psycho- 
analytic investigation. Neurotic symptoms, 
defects of the memory, slips of the tongue, 
are not accidental trends but have a definite 
psychological meaning and purpose — but 
this meaning and purpose can be disclosed 
only through the technical devices of psycho- 
analysis. 

The human mind is ever on the alert to 
protect itself through repression into the un- 
conscious from painful memories and anx- 
ieties, but sometimes this repression over- 
steps itself and leads to all sorts of neurotic 
disturbances, through what is technically 
termed, "a flight into disease." Psycho- 
analysis is the method of probing into these 
unconscious psychological settings. All 
psychoanalysis leads to the realm of the un- 

[4] 



INTRODUCTION 

conscious, that strange mental world, bar- 
baric, primitive, the repository of repressed 
emotions, of a sort of elemental Titan, which 
at times pushes the censorship aside and al- 
lows these infantile emotions to invade con- 
sciousness. There they are perceived like a 
foreign body and manifest themselves in anx- 
ieties, fears, depression, and compulsive 
thinking. On the contrary, in the uncon- 
scious are also precipitated those mental 
traits which aid in the formation of charac- 
ter and in the development of social con- 
sciousness, both of which are so important 
for adjustment to the realities and struggles 
of everyday life. It is the task of the psy- 
choanalysis to investigate the origin of these 
hidden repressions through the technical 
methods which have been devised in the de- 
velopment of the science. 

Whenever the principles of psychoanaly- 
sis have been applied, particularly in the 
unique concept of unconscious thinking, 

[5] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

either to therapeutics or to cultural or social 
problems, the various utilizations fit accu- 
rately. Psychoanalysis has also shown that 
human motives cannot be explained by or- 
dinary superficial reactions, but behind these 
reactions lie repressions and resistances of 
which the individual is unaware and which 
guide his thinking like an unknown force. 
The unconscious, emotional settings of all 
minds are alike, they differ only in their con- 
scious rationalizations and methods of in- 
tellectual approach. 

The reader must bear in mind that the 
subject matter of this volume deals more 
with repressed feelings than with groups of 
ideas technically known as complexes. 

Parts of Chapter II, and of Chapters IV 
and V, have been taken with certain modifi- 
cations and additions from my papers in the 
Psychoanalytic Review and the Journal of 
Abnormal Psychology. 

ISADOR H. CORIAT. 

Boston, March 1920. 

[6] 



CHAPTER I 

THE MEANING OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

Emotional repression is the defense of 
conscious thinking from mental processes 
which are painful. This provides not only 
a method of mental protection, but if it 
fails, it may lead to severe neurotic dis- 
turbances. In the process of repression 
there is a continual conflict between the 
primitive emotions as they exist in the un- 
conscious and the more highly evolved hu- 
man impulses in consciousness. The me- 
chanism of repression lies at the root of 
Freud's entire conception of the human 
mind and psychoanalysis cannot be under- 
stood unless the theory of repression is 
clearly comprehended. Repression accom- 
panies the individual at every stage of men- 

[7] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

tal development, from the primitive psyche 
of the child to the highly complex integra- 
tions of the adult mind. 

In the course of development of the in- 
dividual, certain powerful components of 
the mental life, particularly referring to the 
sexual impulse, may undergo a repression. 
Before this repression became a social factor 
it was first an individual phenomenon of 
great importance. From the earliest dawn 
of history, certain emotions were pushed 
aside and psychological barriers erected to 
prevent them entering into the field of con- 
sciousness. Repression is not suspension of 
the forbidden ideas or emotions. These 
ideas or emotions, although thrust into the 
unconscious, are as specifically active, as full 
of energy, as though clearly recognized in 
conscious thinking. These unconscious 
forces are of great importance in the de- 
velopment of the race or the individual. 
For the former they may lead to all sorts of 

[8] 



THE MEANING 

mental epidemics which from time to time 
sweep over society, for the latter, they may 
act as forms of defense from painful ideas 
or as symptom creators of a future neurosis. 
This concept of emotional repression is 
very important for psychoanalysis. It leads 
not only to an understanding of the various 
types of neuroses, and those tricks of mind 
which produce the forgetting of familiar 
words, but at the same time its social im- 
portance is such, that civilized society would 
rapidly become a chaos if it were not for the 
action of individual repression in protecting 
the human personality and in erecting cer- 
tain social barriers. Even among primitive 
tribes there exist certain religious and moral 
prohibitions, which are really forms of in- 
dividual and social repression. The savage, 
although he appears more at ease than civ- 
ilized man and may experience no sense of 
shame in his nakedness, is yet enmeshed by 
certain tribal prohibitions termed taboos, 

[9] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

which are the oldest unwritten code of human 
laws. 

Psychoanalysis has demonstrated, not 
only in everyday life, but in the behavior 
of subjects undergoing psychoanalytic treat- 
ment of the neuroses, that all forgetting, 
with the exception of forgetting produced 
by actual organic disease of the brain, is due 
to repression. The entire subject of forget- 
ting and its motivation by emotional repres- 
sion, can be best understood by giving the 
details of a simple case in which this mechan- 
ism was a predominating factor. 

A young woman complained of difficulty in 
remembering or recalling words with which 
she was completely familiar. An examina- 
tion showed no signs of organic disease of 
the brain and further enquiry into the diffi- 
culty disclosed the fact that there was no ac- 
tual deterioration of memory, but that the 
forgotten words related to specific anxieties 
and situations in the patient's life. Neither 

[10] 









THE MEANING 



did the forgetting of the word depend on in- 
attention, because the more concentrated and 
intense her attention for a given fact, the less 
able was she to reproduce the word. In ad- 
dition the forgetting referred only to fa- 
miliar words. Sometimes the incorrect 
word would enter her mind and remain there 
in spite of efforts to dislodge it. An analy- 
sis of the forgetting of these familiar words 
demonstrated that it w r as motivated by an 
unconscious emotional factor, the factor of 
repression. Examples are the following: — 
There was a complete inability to recall 
the phrase "latent powers" but free associa- 
tions 1 showed that this forgetfulness of 
the phrase was closely linked up with pain- 
ful and therefore repressed memories of her 
brother's former alcoholic habits when she 

i Freud attributes to psychical events a rigorous deter- 
minism, — that is, even so-called free associations to a given 
word are directly related in a causative manner to the 
initial word. Of course this connection is not always 
realized by the subject, as it is so often unconscious. 

[ii] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

feared that the alcohol might ruin him men- 
tally and thus he would fail to utilize what 
was best in him (his latent powers) . 

On another occasion she could not recall 
the word "accommodator" (referring to 
domestic servants) . An analysis of the for- 
getting process involved, here disclosed the 
fact that because of some financial reverses, 
she really did not want an accommodator for 
reasons of economy. It was her anxiety 
over this latter which blocked the word and 
prevented it from reaching consciousness. 

A number of other instances of forgetting 
were analyzed and as the cause for the for- 
getting of each word was disclosed, this word 
was no longer forgotten and could be recalled 
at any time. The inability to recall familiar 
words finally disappeared. In this case it 
could be shown that the forgetting of famil- 
iar words was due to emotional factors and 
not to any actual deterioration of memory. 
This emotional factor was repression, which 

[12] 



THE MEANING 

sidetracked and blocked the word and pre- 
vented it from entering consciousness, al- 
though the word was fully conserved in the 
unconscious. It was not the conservation 
of the word that was at fault, since it was 
completely stored up, but the reproduction 
faculty was defective, and this defect of re- 
production was produced by emotional re- 
pression, — that is, the apparently forgotten 
words were associated with a disagreeable 
emotion. Consequently the inability of rec- 
ollection was for the purpose of protecting 
the mind from this disagreeable emotion, in 
other words, the forgetting was a purposeful 
act of defense, it was motivated by an un- 
conscious wish to forget. 

In this case for the purpose of cure, it was 
not necessary to analyze all the forgotten 
words, because the removal of a few repres- 
sions, not only released other groups of re- 
pressions, but actually prevented new words 
from being forgotten. The forgotten words 

[13] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

had not vanished, they were preserved in the 
unconscious; they were merely sidetracked 
and could not be recalled because of repres- 
sion. The repression was purposeful, for 
the words were associated with disagreeable 
incidents. This is a simple instance of the 
action of emotional repression. In the neu- 
roses the mechanism is the same, but more 
complicated, capable of extreme ramifica- 
tions and can only be revealed by a long and 
searching psychoanalysis. 

Repression lies at the bottom of ordinary 
forgetfulness, it is an inability to reproduce 
memories and not an incapacity for storing 
them up. Analysis of such conditions shows 
how unscientific are the various methods de- 
vised for improving the memory. They are 
all based on the erroneous supposition that 
a memory defect is due to an inability to 
store up facts, the emotional factor of repro- 
duction being entirely disregarded. 

[14] 



THE MEANING 

Thus ordinary forgetfulness is not due to 
chance, but follows definite laws. In the 
case given, there was not only forgetfulness, 
but actual false recollection, — the striving 
for the escaped name brought substitutive 
names into the mind, which were recognized 
as false. The same process which produced 
the forgetting (an unconscious wish to for- 
get), led to the substitution (an unconscious 
wish to keep the word hidden). 

This forgetting is motivated by repression. 
The repressed material which side-tracked 
the word, prevented it from entering con- 
sciousness, was emotional, as around the ap- 
parently "forgotten" word were crystallized 
painful and rebellious feelings. 

When we come to study the mental de- 
velopment of an individual, as revealed to us 
by the psychoanalysis of adults and those of 
children who develop abortive neuroses early 
in life, we find that the first repressions do 
not begin until about the third year, and re- 

[15] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

fer principally to the primitive impulses of 
hunger and love. Then they start with the 
sense of shame, the sense of pleasure in a 
body, certain perversions relating to the ex- 
creta, the desire to run about naked and to 
become destructive to property. In adults 
the childhood repressions appear only in 
dreams because of the strict censorship of 
society. This explains the frequent non-em- 
barrassment dream of being insufficiently 
clothed in company. 

The unconscious is made up of repressed 
elements and the beginning of the uncon- 
scious coincides with the beginning of repres- 
sion. Therefore in very young children the 
dreams, whose only source is the unconscious, 
are literal wishes for food and play, without 
any evidence of repression. 

This brings us to the consideration of an 
interesting question, academic, it is true, yet 
fraught with the most practical applications, 
namely, first, why is the "unconscious" un- 

[16] 



THE MEANING 

conscious ? * and secondly, what is the rela- 
tion of the collective unconscious of the race 
to the important herd instinct ? 2 

The best explanation of the psychology of 
crowds can be found in the herd instinct, that 
is that the collective unconscious is imper- 
sonal. It is really nascent thought, which 
has not become crystallized into conscious 
action. The personal unconscious, that is, 
the unconscious of the individual human be- 
ings, is a part of this collective unconscious 
and cannot be separated from it. This ex- 
plains why no individual can be completely 
emancipated from the crowd or from the 
social structure of society in which he lives 
and moves and has his being. This also ex- 
plains the so-called "mental contagion" 
which is so important for collective opinion. 

Thus the herd instinct ensures that the be- 

i See at this point the interesting symposium by Nicoll, 
Rivers and Jones "Why is the 'Unconscious' Unconscious?" 
British Jowrnal of Psychology — Vol. IX, 1918. 

2 W. Trotter — '"Instincts of the Herd in Peace and 
War"— 1918. 

[IT] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

havior of the individual shall harmonize with 
the community as a whole, and determines 
the ethical code of man and his conduct and 
opinions. The herd instinct is, therefore, 
really the collective unconscious of society. 
The unconscious mind has six chief charac- 
teristics, namely: — 

1. It is the result of repression and this 
repression occurs because the unconscious 
mental processes are of a character incom- 
patible with the civilized conscious person- 
ality. 

2. It is dynamic in nature, for in the un- 
conscious the most active mental processes 
are active and elaborated. This active striv- 
ing is of the nature of wishing and these 
wish impulses form the external manifesta- 
tions of the unconscious. 

3. It is the repository of crude and primal 
instincts. 

4. It is infantile in character and this in- 

[18] 



THE MEANING 

fantile characteristic persists throughout the 
whole of life. 

5. It is illogical and tends to ignore the 
ordinary standards of life. 

6. Its sexual characteristics (using "sex- 
ual" in the broad, psychoanalytic sense) are 
predominant and as a rule, these characteris- 
tics manifest themselves in a symbolized 
rather than in a literal form. 

It is impossible to agree entirely with the 
idea, that the unconscious embodies entirely 
the lower and more brutal qualities of man, 
that it is irrational, primitive, savage, cruel 
and lacks individuality and self control. 
Out of crowds, in war or in revolutions, there 
have crystallized acts of sublime heroism, 
sort of sublimations of the unconscious, and 
this in itself invalidates the idea that the un- 
conscious is the repository of primitive and 
basal instincts alone. 

Concerning the origin of the unconscious 

[19] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

it is best to quote from Rank and Sachs, 
with whom we are in complete agreement. 
"Our first question will naturally concern the 
origin of the unconscious. Since the uncon- 
scious stands completely foreign and un- 
known to the conscious personality, the first 
impulse would be to deny connection with 
consciousness in general. This is the man- 
ner in which the folk-belief has ever treated 
it. The bits of the unconscious which were 
visible in abnormal mental states passed as 
proof of "being possessed" that is, they were 
conceived as expressions of a strange individ- 
ual, of a demon, who had taken possession 
of the patient. We, who can no longer rely 
on such supernatural influences must seek 
to explain the facts psychologically. The 
hypothesis that a primary division of the 
psychic life exists from birth, contradicts the 
experience of the continual conflict between 
the two groups of forces ; since if the separa- 
tion were present from the beginning, the 

[20] 



THE MEANING 

danger of shifting of boundaries would not 
exist. The only possible assumption, which 
is further confirmed by experience, is, the 
separation does not exist a priori but origin- 
ates only in the course of time. This de- 
marcation of the boundary line must be a 
level of culture; thus, we may say it begins 
in earliest childhood and has found tempor- 
ary termination about the time of puberty. 
The unconscious originates in the childhood 
of man, which circumstance affords the ex- 
planation for most of its peculiarities." 1 

Enmeshed as we all are in the complex 
structure of modern civilization, a certain 
amount of repression is often an instrument 
of safety for the individual. It is true that 
repression may reach a point of such inten- 
sity that there may be an outbreak of the re- 
pressed material after severe fatigue or emo- 
tional strain, leading to the development of 
neurotic disturbances or nervous "break- 

i Otto Rank and Hans Sachs, "The Significance of Psycho- 
analysis for the Mental Sciences"— 1915. 

[21] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

downs" as they are popularly termed. A 
nervous breakdown is not due to overwork 
or over-worry, these merely act as pre- 
cipitating factors in unlocking the material 
which has been repressed in the unconscious. 

This psychoanalytic conception is per- 
fectly sound and is diametrically opposed to 
the superficial view-point of the French 
school, particularly Babinski, who states 
dogmatically that "When the human soul is 
shaken by a profound and sincere emotion, 
there is no room left in it for hysteria." 
Of course such a conception deals only with 
recognized conscious processes. In order to 
understand the relation of repressed emo- 
tions to hysteria, it is necessary to approach 
the problem, not from the descriptive aspect, 
but from the interpretative, from the view- 
point of unconscious mental conflicts. 

The curse of modern civilization lies in ex- 
cessive repression leading to codes of be- 
havior and standards which are fraught with 

[22] 



THE MEANING 

great danger. As repression begins in the 
child, it is there that the difficulty arises. 
The child should be given free play and ac- 
tivity, adult codes should not be stamped on 
it, it should be taught to sublimate and not 
to set up an ideal so impossible of attain- 
ment that repression of this ideal becomes 
necessary, leading to all sorts of mental con- 
flicts. 

What is termed sadism is a form of re- 
pressed hate. In the early education of the 
child and in the suppressions of civilized so- 
ciety, hate is strongly repressed in its out- 
ward manifestations. The repressed ten- 
dency to hate is one of the stages in the de- 
velopment of normal children and shows it- 
self in them in outbursts of irritability and 
anger. Children, too, take a keen delight 
in inflicting punishment on animals, or on 
other children, on toys or dolls, the latter 
for the child symbolizing the living object. 
Certain adults seem to have never been able 

[23] 



I 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

to successfully sublimate this repressed 
cruelty so as to transform it into more use- 
ful social activity. They retain their child- 
hood pleasure by procuring enjoyment out 
of pain inflicted upon others. 

These individuals are unaware of their re- 
pressed cruelty and unconsciously seek posi- 
tions where this repressed feeling can find 
an outlet. Here also are grouped the neu- 
rotic antivivisectionists whose unconscious 
sadistic tendencies to inflict pain on others 
are covered up or compensated by, an over- 
tenderness for animals. 

As an example of cruelty, which had be- 
come strongly repressed into the unconscious, 
the following case can be cited. In a young 
woman who was undergoing a psychoanaly- 
sis for a severe type of anxiety hysteria, the 
two following dreams occurred in one night. 

Dream 1. Her little dog seemed to have 
been injured and was covered with blood 

[24] 



THE MEANING 

and she carried him to a veterinary surgeon 
on a mattress. 

Dream 2, Her canary bird had been 
killed by two cats and appeared covered 
with blood. 

It is well known in psychoanalysis that 
where more than one dream occurs during 
the night, or rather during the same period 
of sleep, that it deals with the same repressed 
material. It is doubtful in these cases 
whether we are dealing with two dreams, or 
two halves of the same dream. Dreams rep- 
resent repressions into the unconscious, they 
are fulfillments of current wishes reenforced 
by infantile material. In the case referred 
to, the young woman had always been over- 
sympathetic towards animals, for years had 
been a member of the Society for the Pre- 
vention of Cruelty to Animals and was also 
an ardent antivivisectionist. The mere idea 
of inflicting pain on animals had always 

[25] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

made her nauseated and she became hyster- 
ical if she saw an animal suffer. So strong 
was her attachment for animals that she had 
birds, dogs, a monkey and even a dried alli- 
gator in her home. Yet this young woman, 
who by her outward reactions was so sensi- 
tive to pain in animals, had in her uncon- 
scious a repository of repressed cruelty as 
shown by her dreams, since all dreams are the 
product of the unconscious. This solicitude 
for dumb animals was merely a conscious 
defense for her unconsciously repressed 
cruelty. 

An excellent example of sadism in history 
is Gilles de Retz of Brittany, the original 
Blue Beard, who was executed for lust-mur- 
der at Nantes in 1440. 1 

The character of Iago, of all great crea- 
tions in literature, stands predominant as a 
type of repressed cruelty, of rinding pleasure 
in the sufferings of others. Iago is cruel be- 

i See Thomas Wilson's "Blue Beard, a Contribution to 
History and Folk-lore"— 1899. 

[26] 



THE MEANING 

cause he is pathological, pain is a source of 
pleasure to him and behind it all, lies the 
cynicism of his character and the almost com- 
plete lack of erotic feeling. Iago is not, as 
Coleridge states, "the motive-hunting of a 
motiveless malignity," for admirable as this 
characterization is, it does not express the 
deeper motives of Iago's character. 

Frequently in marital conflicts, which con- 
stitute so large a portion of the defense-hys- 
terias of adult life, there is a strong tendency 
to outbursts of repressed cruelty in the 
quarrels of husband and wife, what really 
might be termed childhood reactions to adult 
situations. 

The history of civilization has proved be- 
yond doubt that there exists a close relation- 
ship between cruelty and the sexual impulse. 
We can cite the examples of those subjects 
whose cravings are satisfied by being 
whipped themselves or whipping others and 
finally those cases of lust murder which from 

[27] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

time to time attract wide public attention. 
It is really the gratification of the sexual 
feeling by seeing or inflicting pain and as 
such, all adults possess it to a certain degree, 
but it is greatly repressed. Under certain 
conditions the repression is broken down, the 
adult regresses to the time of childhood when 
little or no repression took place. In these 
circumstances the repressed cruelty breaks 
forth and projects itself into all forms of 
abnormal symptoms. A case of automatic 
laughter on analysis was found to be based 
on sadistic fantasies and the laughter was 
really the unconscious pleasure in the ideas 
of pain. 

Early in the development of psychoan- 
alysis, the cause of every neurosis was sought 
in so-called trauma or emotional injury, the 
painful memory of the shock remaining 
active in the unconscious, but hidden from 
the thoughts of the subject and producing 
its effect in the manner of a foreign body. 

[28] 



THE MEANING 

At that time a complete talking out or abre- 
action, which constituted the so-called 
cathartic method, was thought to be suffi- 
cient to produce a cure. It is this viewpoint 
of psychoanalytic therapeutics which is still 
held by those who have not followed its re- 
cent developments and manifestations. 
These developments have become elaborated 
through the perfection of practical technique 
and a deeper understanding of repressions 
as they affect human emotions and conduct. 
It is now known that the task of psy- 
choanalysis consists primarily in overcom- 
ing those inner resistances which prevent the 
repressed emotions from finding complete 
and more nearly normal expression. While 
recent occurrences may act as precipitating 
factors in the production of the neurosis, the 
real basis of the neurosis is found in certain 
emotions which have become strongly re- 
pressed into the unconscious and are pre- 
vented from finding a normal escape. It is 

[29] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

not necessary that actual memories or emo- 
tional scenes become repressed, for the re- 
pression of fantasies or images, particularly 
those produced in early childhood, can pro- 
duce neurotic manifestations. For instance 
a neurosis is often produced by carrying into 
adult life from early childhood, an abnormal 
fixation * on one of the parents, the father 
for the girl and the mother for the boy. 
These form the so-called Electra or CEdipus- 
complexes respectively. It is not necessary 
that the fixation be on the parents themselves 
to produce the neurotic deviation, it is suf- 
ficient if the emotion becomes attached to 
the image of the father or mother, as this 

i Fixation is a term utilized in psychoanalysis to indicate 
that during the course of individual development in child- 
hood, the emotional attachment to a member of the family 
lingered too long at a certain age. There it became re- 
pressed into the unconscious, but later in life, for some 
special reason, the expression of this fixation became reani- 
mated in the form of a neurosis, because the individual 
was never quite able to free himself from his childhood 
attachment during the course of development. The libera- 
tion from this attachment is one of the problems of psycho- 
analytic therapeutics. 

[30] 



THE MEANING 

image when conserved in the unconscious, 
may produce its pernicious effect as though 
the attachment were to the actual person. 

The neurotic may thus struggle with the 
image of one long since dead. In fact the 
image to which the patient is transfixed may 
have died before the birth of the patient. 
It is such observations as these which tend 
to prove that the actual person is not neces- 
sary for the conflict, but the image of the 
person may produce a like effect. 

The strength of the repression depends 
upon the actual situation in which it origin- 
ated, the exact type of experience, the gen- 
eral social or ethical attitude towards the 
painful idea and the frequent unconscious 
wish to escape from the reality of the re- 
pressed feeling. A repression may be so 
severe, that the subject, in order to escape it, 
may regress to infantile forms of mental and 
physical activity, as is so often seen in cer- 
tain cases of multiple personality. 

[31] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

It is the inner resistance which prevents 
the repressed emotions from emerging from 
the unconscious to the conscious and this re- 
sistance is a protective mechanism, an act of 
defense. 

While resistance may occur in every day 
life and form the basis of our antagonisms 
and dislikes and attacks of irritability to- 
ward certain individuals, yet it is in the 
course of the psychoanalytic treatment of 
the neuroses that they are the most marked 
and most clearly defined. Under these con- 
ditions, resistances furnish the best material 
for the study of the phenomenon. During 
a psychoanalysis, the repressing force which 
made the neurotic condition, by keeping vari- 
ous repressed emotions in the unconscious, 
is constantly exerting itself to prevent these 
emotions from becoming conscious. The 
conflict between the psychoanalysis and the 
desire on the part of the emotion to remain 
hidden, is the resistance to the treatment 

[32] 



THE MEANING 

which must be overcome. Its object is to 
keep the pathogenic material unconscious; 
hence all psychoanalysis is directed toward 
an overcoming of the resistances, for until 
these are abolished, the neurosis persists. 

These resistances during an analysis may 
assume many different forms, such as ap- 
parently motiveless hate, fear and apprehen- 
sion towards the physician, the "forgetting" 
of dreams and of appointments for the psy- 
choanalysis, finally certain types of dreams 
occur in which the unconscious resistance 
is clearly defined. In these cases as a rule, 
the analysis is dreamed of in a very uncom- 
plementary manner, on other occasions, as in 
the case of a young woman, there may be a 
veritable bombardment of resistances during 
the period of the analysis. In this case, in 
the course of the one visit, six clearly de- 
fined resistances were detected, such as a 
symptomatic action, the forgetting of a 
dream, coming late for an appointment, a 

[33] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

curious error in spelling, etc. After these 
resistances were overcome, the analysis pro- 
gressed smoothly. 

An example of this resistance as it occurs 
in dreams, was furnished by the case of a 
young woman who was undergoing a psycho- 
analysis for anxiety hysteria. During the 
course of the analysis she had the following 
dream. 

She seemed to be taking an examination 
in Chinese history, but the questions were 
written upside down on the blackboard. In 
her hand she held a porcelain blue and white 
bust of Buddha. She was unable to answer 
the examination questions, in fact, she could 
not read them and so handed in a blank ex- 
amination paper. 

To the psychoanalyst, the analysis of this 
dream is clear. It represents a resistance 
in the form of symbols, the process of sym- 
bolization being carried out unconsciously, 

[34] 



THE MEANING 

the subject being quite unaware of the sym- 
bols employed. It really represented the 
manner of unconscious thinking in a form 
unrecognizable by consciousness, and like all 
symbols, the choice was not arbitrary, but 
had its sources in the unconscious. 1 In this 
case, the subject of the examination 
(Chinese history) , the distortion of the ques- 
tions (upside down) and the statuette 
(Buddha), all signified a resistance, namely, 
that the psychoanalysis was a mystery to her, 
she was unable to understand its meaning or 
purpose. The teacher in the dream was the 
psychoanalyst and the blank examination 
paper, which she handed to him, symbolized 
her ignorance of the examination (psycho- 
analysis). 

There are different degrees of intensity 
of repression, but their mechanism and pur- 

i See my "What is Psychoanalysis?" pp. 60-61 for a 
more detailed explanation of symbolism in psychoanalysis. 

[35] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

pose are identical, whether it produces the 
absentmindedness and forgetting of every- 
day life or whether it produces a severe hys- 
teria. 

In dreams the repressed emotion often 
appears with startling clearness, either lit- 
eral or symbolized, according to the degree 
of resistance which produced the displace- 
ment and symbolism. Sometimes the orig- 
inal repressed feeling is so sidetracked dur- 
ing sleep, that the dream assumes the form 
of what is popularly known as a nightmare 
and technically as a anxiety dream. 

The power which produced the repression 
is always active and with the lapse of time 
the repression becomes more permanent and 
sinks deeper into the unconscious. It is the 
task of the psychoanalyst to dig out these 
buried emotions and for this reason, the older 
the person or the longer the duration of the 
neurosis, the more difficult becomes the psy- 
choanalytic therapy, as the cause of the neu- 

[36] 



THE MEANING 

rosis in these cases may be deeply buried in 
the lowest levels of the unconscious. 

It is these various levels of the unconscious 
which offer such perplexing problems for 
psychoanalysis in the removal of repressions 
and the neurotic conflicts. The descent into 
the various levels of the unconscious may be 
compared in its difficulties with Dante's own 
neurotic conflict, while the guide, Virgil, may 
be compared to the psychoanalyst. At the 
lowest level of the unconscious are the ar- 
chaic and primitive emotions such as nutri- 
tion and sex, then at the next level, rage, 
fear, and cruelty, a little higher up are lo- 
cated the abnormal fixations on the family, 
then occurs the level of the censor, finally 
the foreconscious and the conscious level. 
Of course this plan is purely schematic, but 
it is useful for purposes of description. It 
is at the level below the censor that all 
dreams are made. 

So the psychoanalyst becomes the paleo- 

[37] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

psychologist and the uncovering of the vari- 
ous levels of the unconscious, each level rep- 
resenting a regression to the collective men- 
tal life of our ancestors, may be termed 
paleopsychology. 1 

In the struggle between repressed emo- 
tions and the social conscious life there are 
produced irritations and antipathies, which 
are synonymous with touching a sore spot 
in the unconscious. All of us in life attempt 
to avoid pain and seek pleasure, life is a con- 
stant attempt to escape from reality, hence 
the popularity of the stage, the dance, the 
movies and the use of narcotic drugs. 

We recall so little of the past, particularly 
of our childhood life, not because it has faded 
from memory or been destroyed, but because 
it has been repressed. That the incidents of 
childhood are merely repressed and not for- 
gotten is shown by the fact that these appar- 
ently forgotten memories often appear liter- 

i This conception of the various levels of the unconscious 
is more completely elaborated in a later chapter of the book. 

[38] 



THE MEANING 

ally in dreams or in symptomatic actions. 

Repressed emotions seek satisfaction in 
the outlet of a more primitive manner in the 
form of a neurosis, such as anxiety, fear, 
depression, or compulsive thinking. This 
repression is determined because it is intoler- 
able and painful. Those who can work off 
their repressed feelings in social reconstruc- 
tion, mutual aid, intellectual work or aes- 
thetic pursuits, are the happiest individuals. 
This process of using a repressed emotion 
for a more useful purpose is termed sublima- 
tion. Those who bottle up their feelings, 
who become victims of introversion and shut 
up their personality by building a wall of 
resistance about it, who are unable to find an 
adequate escape from intolerable conflicts, 
who show infantile reactions to adult situa- 
tions, these are the unhappy neurotics. 

The requirements of civilized society, of a 
social and moral and ethical code, tend to 
make us repress our frank feelings. Hence 

[39] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

arise the neuroses in an abnormal sense, and 
in everyday life, we have the conventional 
lies of civilization. These repressed emo- 
tions never emerge in their original shape, 
but are converted either into dreams, hys- 
terical symptoms, anxieties, fears, compul- 
sive thinking, depression and insomnia. 

The cohesion of modern society is based 
upon repression, not so much in the sense of 
legal formulations, but a repression arising 
from within the individual. Psychoanalysis 
understands the psychogenetic determinants 
of these repressed impulses and although in- 
wardly there may be mental conflicts, yet 
the repression of these conflicts produces an 
outward semblance of comfort. We all 
have past or present mental conflicts which 
we attempt to repress and this repression 
may be successful or unsuccessful. Some- 
times as a substitution for this repression an 
individual may take a flight into a sort of 
phantasmal comfort, that is, he may substi- 

[40]- 



THE MEANING 

tute or rationalize for his real conflicts, some- 
thing which for the time being may be a 
cover for this conflict, even though such a 
process may be based on insincerity. 

Mass repression is nothing but a collec- 
tion of individual repressions cemented to- 
gether by the herd instinct. Because of the 
evolution of modesty the greatest repression 
is in the sexual sphere. 

The unconscious, being a common ethnic 
possession is the same in both primitive and 
civilized society, with the difference, that in 
the latter, more repressed material is found. 
Neurotic disorders arise from a blocking of 
the sexual instinct, but the panacea is not 
sexual indulgence, otherwise the Don Juans 
of society would be free from neuroses. 

The psychoanalyst, when he approaches 
the problem of repression in the neuroses, 
needs more than skill, more than a perfect 
technique, more than a knowledge of the 
psychology of the neuroses. His mind must 

[41] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

be clean as a surgeon's hands before an op- 
eration, his attitude towards the neurosis 
should be that of the physician whose task 
it is to help and not that of the moralist who 
thinks it his duty to criticize. Any criti- 
cism even inwardly, of the patient's life his- 
tory, of his conflicts and repressions is apt 
to set up within the analyst an inner resist- 
ance, and this resistance in the analyst as 
well as within the patient, may interfere with 
the course of the psychoanalytic therapy. 
Both patient and physician should clearly 
recognize the problem with which they are 
dealing, the truth must be thrashed out, no 
matter how painful. Every psychoanalyst 
should know his own resistances and com- 
plexes as well as his various social, religious 
and political prejudices. 

Psychoanalysis is of great value in a com- 
plex modern civilization, not only for the 
treatment of the neuroses, but also for the in- 
sight it furnishes into certain character de- 

[42] 



THE MEANING 

i 

fects. To make a person aware of his re- 
pressions instead of closing his mind to them, 
is to utilize the knowledge gained for the 
development of his character. A psycho- 
analysis is thus an education, it raises the un- 
conscious to a higher cultural level. 

As is well known, psychoanalysis, as elab- 
orated by Freud, means an analysis of the 
mind, a study of man's unconscious motives, 
repressions and conflicts. Psychoanalysis 
also demonstrates that the very foundations 
of character spring from the unconscious of 
the individual and shape his behavior. In 
other words each individual determines his 
own character and destiny. Character 
traits are not inherited but acquired. 

In 1907 one of the greatest thinkers of the 
Freudian school, Alfred Adler, of Vienna, 
began the publication of his remarkable 
works on individualistic psychology. 1 He 

i See Alfred Adler's two principal Contributions — "The 
Neurotic Constitution" and "Organ Inferiority and its 
Psychical Compensation." 

[43] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

demonstrated that the predominant traits of 
character are efforts on the part of the indi- 
vidual to overcome a feeling of either mental 
or physical inferiority. For instance, a man 
who as a boy is a weakling will become an 
advocate of the strenuous life, or one whose 
thoughts are not what they should be may 
become overzealous in the reform of so-called 
vulgar literature and art. Demosthenes, 
the stammerer, became the greatest orator of 
Greece. 

It is well known to physicians that a weak 
or inferior organ tends to overcome its de- 
fects : a weak heart compensates by growing 
larger and stronger, if one of the kidneys is 
removed, the remaining kidney enlarges and 
performs the work of two. 

This is exactly what happens in the men- 
tal sphere. The feeling of inferiority forces 
the individual to make supreme efforts to 
overcome this particular defect. Feelings 

[44] 



THE MEANING 

of inferiority are compensated for in various 
ways by the person becoming egotistical, 
boastful, envious, showing a tendency to un- 
dervalue all men and things except them- 
selves, developing ideas of greatness and om- 
nipotence of thinking* Of course, from a 
Freudian standpoint, this compensation is 
really a repression of the inferior feeling. 

This tendency to compensate is an uncon- 
scious mental process, the only conscious 
feeling being the over-compensation which 
takes the form of day-dreams. Their origin 
is unknown and never understood by the 
sufferer. These day-dreams are so often re- 
peated that they become part and parcel of 
the personality, they cannot be distinguished 
from reality. Thus, the individuals with 
feelings of inferiority, whether real or fan- 
cied, are individuals who possess inferior or- 
gans which they attempt to compensate. 
This is Adler's great contribution, the re- 

[45] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

markable relationship between inferiority of 
physical structure or feelings of inferiority 
and mental compensation. 

The collective unconscious of society is the 
same as the unconscious of the single indi- 
vidual, because however much individuals 
may differ in their characterological traits, 
it is in their merging, their cohesion by what 
is termed the herd instinct, that unifies this 
^plastic human material. Therefore society 
like an individual suffers from resistances, 
from mass repression and from flights into 
emotional upheavals. 

Society consequently can be psychoana- 
lyzed in much the same way as an individual. 
Thus psychoanalysis can show the real char- 
acter of society, can lay bare the hidden, 
subterranean motives which lie behind its 
various emotional manifestations. Society, 
too, like the individual, has its dreams and 
these dreams in a primitive community take 
the form of symbolic creations, myths, folk 

[46] 



THE MEANING 

lore, and in a more materialistic age, of ideal 
commonwealths . 

All these efforts of society to break away 
from its present status are really the fulfill- 
ment of the repressed wishes of the collective 
unconscious, in the same manner that a 
dream represents the repressed wish of the 
individual unconscious. No social problem 
can be solved or understood unless the mo- 
tive force of this collective unconscious is 
taken into consideration. The motive force, 
the key to all human activity, is the repressed 
wish. 

The foundation of psychoanalysis rests 
upon the theory of the unconscious. Psy- 
choanalysis frees the repressed impulses 
from the formation of neurotic symptoms 
and the false attitude towards reality and 
adapts these impulses to real possibilities in 
social paths of gratification and develop- 
ment. 

It is the task of the psychoanalysis to warn 

[47] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

against too strong repression in childhood 
and thus turn the normal impulses of the 
child into channels which are fraught with 
neurotic pitfalls. Instincts should be con- 
trolled and not repressed and this control 
should show itself in varying adaptations to 
reality. As stated by Rank and Sachs * — 
"The child is only to be educated by love 
and under this condition will feel sufficiently 
punished by a withdrawal of this. Only for 
a beloved person does he gladly give up the 
undesirable attributes and aims, and as- 
sumes an imitation, by way of identification 
with adults, what culture, in the shape of this 
beloved object of love demands of him." It 
was stated in a previous contribution. 2 
"The treatment of the psychoneuroses should 
begin early, it should be prophylactic and 
educate and correctly mold the psycho- 
sexual trends of his child. The best method 

i O. Rank and H. Sachs "The Significance of Psycho- 
analysis for the Mental Sciences." 

2 Isador H. Coriat — "Psychoanalysis and the Sexual Hy- 
giene of Children"— The Child, Jan., 1912. 

[48] 



THE MEANING 

of controlling these feelings is to teach the 
child to change or sublimate these into 
higher artistic or intellectual interests." 

Dr. Oskar Pfister of Zurich, Switzerland, 1 
has found a large number of neurotics among 
school children, neuroses whose origin is 
emotional, such as stammering, morbid fears, 
blushing, shyness, petty stealing and lying, 
all of which could be made to disappear 
under psychoanalytic treatment. It is to 
the lazy, uninterested, stupid, day-dreaming 
pupils (provided of course that actual or- 
ganic feeblemindedness can be eliminated) 
that psychoanalysis can be applied and be of 
material help. 

As an example, a young man came for 
personal advice because of inability to study 
and to concentrate. This is a very frequent 
complaint during the period of puberty and 
adolescence. An analysis proved that the 

l See Oskar Pfister— "The Psychoanalytic Method"— from 
which the quotations are taken (translated by Dr. Charles 
R. Payne). 

[49] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

subject suffered from -a very severe form of 
day dreaming, a sort of withdrawal from 
reality, because he preferred his day-dreams 
to more practical efforts of study. Such an 
individual tendency is full of danger for the 
development of a severe neurosis or even a 
psychosis and should be treated by psycho- 
analysis and not by the usual superficial ad- 
vice to take "training in concentration." In 
this case concentration was not at fault, the 
difficulty was an abnormal slipping back into 
a realm of day-dreaming because the realities 
of life no longer interested him. 

School teachers should be trained in cer- 
tain psychoanalytic principles in order to 
better appreciate the odd or unusual child 
and to refer him to the proper source for 
treatment. The attitude of such children 
should not be dismissed with the mere label- 
ing of "stubborn" or "inattentive," for the 
motive for such a reaction usually lies deep 
within the personality of the child. 

[50] 



THE MEANING 

As an example of how much harm can be 
done by the parent in not handling the child 
properly, we refer to the case of a ten year 
old boy whose mother kept his hair long, in 
Dutch clip style, like a girl. The boy was 
the youngest of four children, all boys, and 
the mother's disappointment in not having 
a girl found an outlet in having the youngest 
child resemble a girl as much as possible. 
Here is a problem fraught with the most 
dangerous situations, in that this arouses in 
the boy not only a feeling of inferiority, but 
such a boy will be subject to ridicule from 
his playmates and thus tend to become less 
and less social. 

The development of such a mental atti- 
tude of sensitiveness and a shut-in personal- 
ity with all that it implies, lays the founda- 
tion for a severe neurosis during the adoles- 
cent period, when the individual most feels 
the need of becoming a social being. 

Pflster well states as follows — "Parents 

[51] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

must exercise particular care that no feeling 
of inferiority be aroused. In order that the 
child may have a normal relation to father 
and mother, both parents must work to- 
gether harmoniously. The more completely 
we see through a pupil, so much the more 
interesting does he become to us, and the 
more profoundly he perceives himself under- 
stood by us, just so much the more influence 
do we gain over him. He will then no 
longer attempt to escape a just and neces- 
sary command by an unconsciously pro- 
duced headache or to gain our sympathy by 
unconsciously arranged sufferings and to 
pose as a victim of overwork when he is lazy." 
Finally to show how sensitive a child is 
and how it may develop into a situation 
which in an adult would be capable of easy 
adjustment, the case may be cited of an 
eleven year old girl who suddenly told the 
neighbors that she was badly treated at home 
and a few days later ran away, remaining 

[52] 



THE MEANING 

away the greater part of the night. It was 
shown on a short analysis, that her story of 
being badly treated at home was a mere fab- 
rication and that she told this tale and later 
ran away, because recently a baby sister had 
been given her room. This aroused such a 
feeling of jealousy in the child, that her sen- 
sations became those of a sudden impulse, 
to which she added the fabrication of being 
ill treated, in order to fortify her attitude. 

Teachers should have a knowledge of the 
child's unconscious mind for only by this 
knowledge will they develop a greater toler- 
ance for the various perplexities of child- 
hood, the dislikes and distastes of children 
and their often curious reactions to adult 
situations. 

Individual differences between children 
are marked and infinite. For this reason, 
the peculiar behavior of the child can never 
be fathomed by any one of the many so- 
called intelligence tests. The failure to per- 

[53] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

form one of these tests may not mean any 
intellectual deficiency in a given direction, 
but may be due to an emotional blocking of 
thought whose origin is in the unconscious. 
The adolescent situation and the trans- 
formation of puberty is thus expressed by 
Freud. 1 "Simultaneously with the over- 
coming and rejection of these . . . phan- 
tasies, there occurs one of the most important 
as well as one of the most painful psychic 
accompaniments of puberty: it is the break- 
ing away from parental authority. . . . 
Many persons are detained at every station 
in the course of development through which 
the individual must pass; and accordingly 
there are persons who never overcome the 
parental authority and never or very imper- 
fectly withdraw their affections from their 
parents. They are mostly girls, who to the 
delight of their parents retain their full in- 
fantile love far beyond puberty." 

i S. Freud — "Three Contributions to the Sexual Theory." 

[54] 



THE MEANING 

In psychoanalytic terms the situation 
named may be expressed as follows : — From 
very early childhood, beginning at the period 
between three and five years of age, children 
manifest premature choice in relation to 
adults, particularly the adults of the family 
group, such as parents and nurses. This is 
the so-called family romance and this devel- 
opment in the family unit is of great impor- 
tance for the impressions stamped upon the 
plastic mind of the child. It is these impres- 
sions which are gradually repressed and 
forced from consciousness or the foreground 
of the mind into the unconscious or the back- 
ground of the mind. It is in the handling 
of these impressions which are so important 
for the later life of the individual, as to 
whether they will be successfully directed 
and the individual remain healthy, or the in- 
dividual become, incapacitated by these im* 
pressions and become the future neurotic. 

L Thus there comes a time in the life of every 

[55] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

one, in which the great decision must be 
made, whether or not he will retain his emo- 
tional fixation to the family or will break 
away from his infantile moorings, grow in- 
tellectually and emotionally, put aside his 
childhood and go forth into the world of 
reality. It is usually the only child who is 
most liable to retain his infantile attachment 
to the family group. When the critical 
period of puberty and adolescence arrives, 
such an "only child" becomes incapacitated 
by the struggle to break away and manifests 
symptoms of a so-called "nervous break- 
down" so erroneously described to overwork, 
when in reality it is due to an inner conflict 
between the attempt to come into touch with 
adult reality and the breaking away from 
infantile moorings. It is this conflict, this 
vicissitude of the emotional life, this swing- 
ing of the pendulum between childhood and 
adult development, with the new increase of 
repression which it brings with it, that leads 

[56] 



THE MEANING 

so often in adolescent girls to the neurosis 
known as hysteria. Boys too are liable to 
hysterical disturbances at this critical period, 
but to a far less degree than girls, since in 
the latter there is more repression and 
greater physiological and psychological 
change in the life history of the individual. 
In puberty and adolescence also the instinc- 
tive sexual tendencies attempt to find an ob- 
ject on which to fasten themselves outside 
the family group. This explains the strong 
craving for love and the adolescent crushes 
which are so often seen. 

These so-called "crushes" of adolescent 
boys and girls are usually a temporary 
phenomenon and are so frequently encoun- 
tered, that they can be interrupted as merely 
a phase of normal development. The im- 
portance of this tendency in a sublimated 
form in the life of adults, in the evolution of 
friendship, social help and mutual aid, can- 
not be overestimated. 

[57] 



CHAPTER II 

REPRESSED EMOTIONS IN PRIMITIVE 
SOCIETY 

The complex construction of a psycho- 
neurosis in an adult, due to the influence ex- 
erted by the multiplicity of factors of civili- 
zation and cultural advancement, is some- 
* times so bewildering as to almost defy all 
attempts at analysis. In children, the or- 
ganization of a psychoneurosis is usually 
very simple, almost monosymptomatic, and 
in children, too, we often discover these neu- 
roses in the actual processes of making. 
When adult life is reached the individual 
has left behind him all the factors of his 
childhood life and all the repressed experi- 
ences and desires which tend to produce his 
adult characteristics. Among adults of 

[58] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

primitive races however, where the mental 
organization is far less complex than that of 
civilized man, certain psychoneurotic dis- 
turbances are found, which if analyzed, 
might disclose the mental mechanisms of 
these disturbances reduced to their simplest 
terms. 

It has been my good fortune to be able 
to secure data of this sort, pertaining to cer- 
tain curious nervous attacks which occur 
among the primitive races of the Fuegian 
Archipelago. These facts were supplied 
me, following along lines of a questionnaire, 
by the well known explorer Charles Welling- 
ton Furlong, F. R. G. S. who in 1907-1908, 
was in charge of the first scientific expedition 
to cross through the heart of Tierra del 
Fuego. Mr. Furlong's keen powers of ob- 
servation have made the data unusuallv 
complete. While he had no theory to offer 
in explanation of the attacks as seen among 
these primitive tribes, it is interesting to note 

[59] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

that certain of the facts corroborate the well- 
known ideas of sexual repression as elabor- 
ated by Freud. The mental organizations 
of these people, likewise, seem to substan- 
tiate certain psychoanalytic conceptions. 
For a clear comprehension of these attacks, 
certain preliminary anthropological and 
geographical data are necessary. 

The following data relates to running 
amuck or "outbursts," among the Yahgan 
and Ona tribes of the Fuegian Archipelago. 
The data was obtained in 1907 and 1908 dur- 
ing expeditions through the regions of the 
Fuegian Archipelago. 

The Yahgans, some forty years ago, num- 
bered perhaps 2,500, but ill 1908 this number 
had been reduced through contact with civili- 
zation and principally through an epidemic 
of measles to 173. These peoples are canoe 
Indians and inhabit to-day the Island coasts 
from Beale Island to the Wollastons inclu- 
sive, in the neighborhood of Cape Horn, 

[60] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

from about 54 50' S. Lat. to about 55 56' S. 
Lat., making them the southern-most inhab- 
itants of the world. The Ona Indians, a 
taller and finer race physically, who are foot 
Indians, occupy the mountain and forest re- 
gion of southern Tierra del Fuego from ap- 
proximately 53 50' S. Lat. to 55 3' S. Lat. 
The Onas formerly occupied the entire north- 
ern half of Tierra del Fuego and possibly 
numbered some 3,000, but through contact 
and warfare with the whites, who drove 
them south off the open lands of the north, 
they have been reduced to about 300. These 
people are of a light cinnamon colored skin, 
black haired, and of a decided American In- 
dian type. The Onas are above the average 
stature, the Yahgans below it. 

It is not an infrequent occurrence for in- 
dividuals among both the Yahgans and Onas 
to be subject to sudden outbursts of furore 
and violence. At such times, however, it is 
the custom of some of the men to follow 

[61] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

closely behind to see that harm does not come 
through injury against trees, stumbling, or 
falling from the cliffs. They rarely touch 
the afflicted one except to prevent harm, and 
finally will lead him back to the camp, when 
the attack is over or when he is exhausted. 

While the attack occurs both among men 
and women, it seems to be more prevalent 
among men. The individuals in whom these 
attacks predominate are men in the prime of 
life, ranging from twenty-five to thirty-five 
years of age. These people are polygamous, 
as it is the custom for the old men to marry 
young girls thus leaving the old women to 
the younger men, which in many instances 
causes a scarcity of women. 

As a rule the character of the attack con- 
fines itself to the mad rushing away, as above 
described, at other times it consists of at- 
tempts to injure or kill. For instance, a 
rancher of Tierra del Fuego, was in the com- 
pany of some Onas, when suddenly a hatchet 

[62] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

whizzed by him, barely missing his head, and 
buried itself in a log of the Indian shelter. 
This was the result of an attack which sud- 
denly appeared in a native who was afflicted 
thus from time to time. The actual outburst 
in this case was sudden, although it is diffi- 
cult to tell how long it might have been com- 
ing on in the form of brooding, which seems 
to be a premonitory phase of this condition. 
Concerning a personal experience with one 
of the early phases of the attack, Mr. Fur- 
long states as follows: — "I am fully con- 
vinced that one night while camping alone 
with Onas in the heart of the Fuegian for- 
ests, that my head man Aanakin, who had 
a good many killings to his credit, was brood- 
ing as he sat in his wigwam, which opened 
towards the fire; he watched me for nearly 
an hour with an attitude and expression 
which reminded me of the look a dog takes 
on sometimes before he snaps. Aanakin, I 
knew to be of a very moody nature, but this 

[63] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

particular mood was so marked and por- 
tended evil so noticeably toward me without 
any apparent cause, that I decided to do 
something to break its mental trend. So 
putting fresh wood on the fire, to make a 
more brilliant blaze, I walked directly into 
his wigwam and motioned to one of his two 
wives who was lying beside him. There 
was a passing look of half -anger, half-sur- 
prise, but I gave no time for his mind to 
dwell in the same mood, for simultaneously 
I produced my notebook and pencil and be- 
gan to make drawings of animals and other 
things that were familiar to them. They 
like to watch one draw and name the thing, 
and so I kept them busy for perhaps an hour, 
and finally had them in gales of laughter. 
I am quite convinced that I forestalled an 
attack or a condition akin to it." 

It seems that an attack usually begins 
suddenly. However, an instance is given 
where an Ona becoming moody realized that 

[64] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

one of these attacks was incubating and put- 
ting his hands together begged to have his 
wrists and feet bound in order that he would 
not do himself or others harm, or that it 
would not be thought that he meant to kill 
and consequently be shot in self-defense. 
This would seem in a way to indicate that 
there was no amnesia for the attack, as the 
Indian undoubtedly realized what he had 
done in previous attacks. 

The moody state and the realization of 
what might follow as the attack developed, 
demonstrates a sense of uneasiness as the 
premonitory symptom, which ends in a state 
of utter exhaustion and sleep. The nor- 
mal condition is resumed, practically on 
awakening from sleep and recovery of 
strength. 

From a description of Donald McMillan, 
the explorer, the Eskimo disease termed 
Piblokto strongly resembles these attacks of 
the Onas and Yahgan Indians with the ex- 

[65] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

ception that Piblokto was particularly prev- 
alent among women. 1 

How an attack begins is shown by the case 
of Aanakin, an Ona of Furlong's expedition. 
A certain form of melancholia, brooding or 
moodiness, seems to precede many of these 
attacks, with a realization sometimes that an 
attack is developing. The Onas not being 
naturally a quarrelsome people, it may be 
that this realization and foreboding of the 
attack accounts for their tendency to run 
away from their associates, when they have 
endured the strain as long as they can, thus 
placing themselves in a position to avoid a 
deliberate assault or injury to those about 
them. 

It was further stated, in answer to the 
questionnaire — "I cannot give you absolute 
data regarding laughing or crying in this at- 
tack, screaming, yells, foaming at the mouth, 
biting the tongue, tearing the clothes, al- 

i See A. Brill — "Piblokto or Hysteria Among Peary's 
Eskimos" — Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease — 1913. 

[66] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

though I am of the opinion that any or all 
of these things may and do occur. As to 
violent resistance, the case, where the man 
wished to be bound, would show there was 
violent resistance, and it is probable that 
partly for this reason the Onas and Yahgans 
do not molest the afflicted except to prevent 
them from harming themselves, preferring 

to wait until the paroxysm exhausts them. 
I cannot state positively as to whether the 
attack is explained by the natives as being 
due to an evil spirit. While the people are 
polygamous, though having no form of re- 
ligious worship, they usually believe when 
any one has a disease that something has en- 
tered them or some one who dislikes them has 
surreptitiously sent some small animal or ar- 
row into them. Among the Yahgans the 
'Yuccamoosh' (doctors) or magicians pro- 
ceed to pretend to extract these objects by 
a form of squeezing and hugging the patient, 
in the meantime blowing, hissing, etc., to 

[67] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

force the object of evil out. I have never 
known of their doing this, however, to a per- 
son suffering from an attack. 

"I am unable to supply any direct data as 
to the relation of love, hunger, sexuality, 
death of relatives or absent relatives to an 
attack. On the death of a relative, the Yah- 
gans go through incantations in the form of 
a sort of weird death chant, which they often 
sing in unison at certain times of the day 
and night. They paint their faces to show 
' the death to strangers, but they rarely men- 
tion the name of the dead, in fact by most it 
is considered an offense to do so. They 
simply say — 'He is gone.' 'He is no more.' 
They feel the loss of relatives very keenly 
and sorrow for them, and sometimes become 
violent with grief and rage. 

"Regarding the primitive type of mental 
organization among these natives, — despite 
Darwin's first opinion of them, which was 
subsequently modified, — I consider these 

[68] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

people inherently intelligent, though of a 
very primitive type as far as culture is con- 
cerned, probably the most primitive in this 
hemisphere, perhaps in the world, as the 
Onas are to-day living in the Old Stone Age. 
Dr. E. Von Hornbostel of Berlin Univer- 
sity, who has collaborated with me in making 
a special study of my phonographic records 
of their songs, informs me that these songs 
are the most primitive American Indian 
songs of which they have any records." 

Of importance for a clear understanding 
of the mental traits of these Indian tribes, 
as the source from which these attacks de- 
velop, is the study of their dreams, their sys- 
tem of taboos and their myths. So far as 
could be determined from the data supplied, 
the dreams of these primitive races strongly 
resemble the dreams of children, as these 
aboriginal tribes possess many childlike at- 
tributes. In fact up to a certain age the 
civilized child is really a little savage, with 

[69] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

his strong egotism and feelings of rivalry, his 
taboos, his jealousies and his few or no al- 
truistic tendencies. In the child as in the 
savage the wish and the thought are synony- 
mous, both want their desires immediately 
gratified, although such gratification may be 
impossible in reality. 

The dreams of the Yahgan Indians are 
simple wish-fulfillments, without disguise or 
elaboration, like the dreams of a civilized 
child. 

The Yahgan's attitude towards death is 
the same as that of many primitive races 
and their lack of understanding of the real 
meaning of death, strongly resembles in its 
attitude that of a civilized child. Any 
reference to death is strongly tabooed 
among them and to transgress this taboo, ex- 
poses the individual to grave danger and 
severe punishment, even the punishment of 
the thing tabooed. Thus the person who 
transgressed this taboo becomes himself 

[70] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

taboo by arousing the anger or the resent- 
ment of other members of this tribe. How- 
ever, a certain ambivalent * tendency seems 
to be present, for while the word "death" and 
the mention of the dead are prohibited, yet 
they feel deep grief and sorrow for their 
dead relatives. Transgression of the taboo 
may arouse the other aspect of the ambiv- 
alent attitude (for instance anger instead of 
sorrow) and it thus becomes a source of dan- 
ger to the guilty individual and so by con- 
tagion and imitation to the community at 
large. 

This ambivalent tendency which leads to 
taboos is prominent among primitive races 
as well as in civilized children. For in- 
stance, in the latter there may be cited the 
taboo of pronouncing certain words which 
leads to the anxiety neurosis of stammering 

i Ambivalence is a term used in psychoanalysis, which, 
according to Bleuler, "gives the same idea two contrary feel- 
ing tones and invests the same thought simultaneously with 
both a positive and a negative character." 

[71] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

or the taboo of objects possessing a sexual 
significance in producing the compulsion 
neurosis of kleptomania. As civilization 
and cultural advancement increase or as the 
child becomes the adult, the taboo tendency 
gradually declines, yet under certain condi- 
tions it may manifest itself as a psychoneu- 
rotic symptom. 

When we approach this problem of the 
taboo from the field of psychoanalysis, in 
those who live, not in primitive surround- 
ings, but in a highly civilized and complex 
society, we find certain individuals who have 
created artificial taboos for themselves: they 
follow out these prohibitions as strictly as 
the savage follows his taboos. This condi- 
tion is found in the compulsion neurosis, and 
as Freud very ingeniously suggests, the 
term "taboo disease" might be an appro- 
priate one for this malady. In the savage, 
the taboo is a conscious act, bound up with 
certain ceremonials of great religious and 

[72] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

social significance. In the compulsion neu- 
rotic, the taboo has its origin in the uncon- 
scious and the unconscious of the compulsion 
neurotic as shown by the dreams predomin- 
antly contains hostile and savage wishes and 
thus is synonymous with the conscious be- 
havior of primitive peoples themselves. 

After this digression we are in a position 
to understand the psychology of the taboo as 
it is revealed in the compulsion neuroses. 
For this purpose, it is best to relate briefly 
the history of a patient with a compulsion 
neurosis, who came under personal observa- 
tion. 

A young man for several years had had 
the feeling that he became easily contam- 
inated, either by touching objects which he 
felt were contaminated or by merely passing 
a location (such as a dug up street or sewer) , 
which he felt might be the source of contam- 
ination. As a result, he would set up all 
sorts of defensive acts to oppose this con- 

[73] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

tamination, either by having his clothes fre- 
quently cleaned, or by habitually washing 
his hands. In the analysis a large number 
of peculiar dreams appeared which I have 
termed "calamity dreams." In these 
dreams, severe accidents or calamities would 
happen to people who were total strangers 
to the dreamer, such as little girls being run 
over by motor trucks or young men being 
severely cut by broken glass. This type of 
dream is very primitive and savage and 
clearly demonstrates an unconscious hostil- 
ity to inflict pain or suffering, directed to- 
wards any one. These feelings or wishes are 
repressed in the unconscious, and the com- 
pulsion neurosis, the feeling of contamina- 
tion, arises as a defense (or punishment) 
against these repressed, cruel and savage im- 
pulses. 

He worried about the future, because he 
felt that certain objects in years to come 
would remain contaminated from him. To 

[74] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

him the contamination is in the object, is part 
of it, and not inherent in his ideas, although 
it is the reality of his thoughts which forms 
the basis of the compulsive thinking. He 
hopes like primitive peoples, that the trans- 
fer of contamination will relieve him by ac- 
tually making the contamination cling to the 
object, he acts as if inanimate things were 
the carriers of contamination. This is the 
typical taboo-transference of savages and 
shows how primitive is the unconscious of a 
compulsion neurotic. As Freud states : * 
"Obsessive prohibitions possess as extraor- 
dinary capacity for displacement ; they make 
use of almost any form of connection to ex- 
tend from one object to another. The com- 
pulsion neurotics act as if the 'impossible' 
person and things were carriers of a danger- 
ous contagion, which is ready to displace it- 
self through contact to all neighboring 
things." 

i S. Freud— -"Totem and Taboo"— p. 46. 

[75] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

As these particular primitive races have 
no conception of immortality, this taboo can- 
not be a religious or moral obligation or 
prohibition, but a social phenomenon for the 
benefit of the tribe or for the physical welfare 
of the individuals comprising the tribe. 
Freud also has pointed out how the avoid- 
ance of the names of the dead because of the 
fear of offense to the living is found among 
certain South American tribes. He states: 
— "One of the most surprising but at the 
same time one of the most interesting taboo 
customs of mourning among primitive races, 
is the prohibition against pronouncing the 
name of the deceased. The avoidance of the 
name of the deceased is, as a rule, kept up 
with extraordinary severity. Thus among 
many South American tribes it is considered 
the gravest insult to the survivors to pro- 
nounce the name of the deceased in their 
presence, and the penalty set for it is no less 
than that for the slaying itself. . . ." "The 

[76] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

strangeness of this taboo on names dimin- 
ishes if we bear in mind that the savage looks 
upon his name as an essential part and im- 
portant possession of his personality." In 
civilized society too the death of a dearly be- 
loved one is often followed by a purposeful 
forgetting (repression) of their physical ap- 
pearance, a sort of defense of the mind to 
minimize the loss. 

A third factor of importance is a study of 
their myths. These are the savage's day 
dreams. The relation between myths and 
dreams is well known, both having their 
roots in the unconscious thinking of the race. 
In the individual this unconscious mental 
process produces dreams, in the race and 
society, myths. Only one instance will be 
cited, the legend of the Yahgan Indians 
concerning the creation of the first man and 
woman. When one of the tribe was asked 
how the first human being came into the 
world, he replied that a long time ago the 

[77] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

first man came down from the sky on a rope, 
and later, the woman followed. Here is a 
striking instance of how an adult Indian had 
applied his knowledge of individual births 
literally to a cosmic process, a genuine crea- 
tion myth as a form of symbolic thinking. 
There seems little doubt in this case, that the 
sky which to all savages appears like a bowl, 
represented the uterus and the rope, the um- 
bilical cord. The resemblance of this myth 
to certain birth or parturition dreams, as en- 
. countered in the psychoanalytic investiga- 
tions of civilized adults, is certainly striking. 
How is this mass of material to be inter- 
preted? The mental traits of these people 
as shown by an analysis of their taboos, 
myths and dreams, are very primitive in or- 
ganization, in fact according to Mr. Fur- 
long, they represent the most primitive types 
of culture in the world. Individuals of such 
primitive mental traits have not yet learned 
to .successfully repress their emotions and 

[78] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

hence are liable to sudden emotional out- 
bursts. Substitution and repression in civ- 
ilized races are utilized to cover complex 
and multifarious ways of expressing social 
wishes and wants. In the savage there is 
little or no repression and substitution, be- 
cause his desires are simple and easily satis- 
fied. 

These primitive people therefore resemble 
children, without inhibitions or repressions. 
Their attacks of violence and furore are sud- 
den emotional reactions, perhaps hysterical, 
but without any phenomena of what is 
termed hysterical conversion, such as the 
changing of ideas or emotions into physical 
symptoms of paralysis or loss of sensation. 

The relation of the attacks to an unsatis- 
fied sexual craving is shown by the fact that 
the attacks occur only in young men whose 
libido remains unsatisfied, as according to 
tribal custom they are compelled to marry 
old women, or, in the words of the explorer 

[79] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

who lived among the people, "old derelicts." 
This factor, combined with the observation 
that the victims of the attack are free from 
the loss of consciousness and amnesia and the 
absence of an absolute evidence pointing to 
foaming of the mouth or biting of the tongue, 
would seem to indicate that the outbursts 
were hysterical rather than epileptic in 
nature. 

It seems that the attacks themselves are 

motivated, not so much by the actual gross 
sexual as by an ungratified or only partially 
gratified love which would occur in a man 
who is compelled by social and tribal custom 
to marry an old woman. Among the Eski- 
mos this factor is at work in the woman, 
among the Fuegians in the men. Conver- 
sion phenomena were absent, because their 
mental organization is very simple, in the 
same way that childhood hysteria is free from 
conversion symptoms or at most is mono- 
symptomatic. 

[80] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

That the unconscious thinking of man is 
the same the world over and that similar 
symbolic representations of repressed feel- 
ings can be found in primitive tribes sep- 
arated by time and space, is shown by the 
identity of the myths of the Pueblo dwellers 
of America and the Polynesian and Aus- 
tralian myths, as compared with the myths 
of the Fuegian. There is a strong identity 
between dreams and myths, both are child- 
hood phantasies which have been repressed 
into the unconscious and both are symbolic. 
In the case of a dream this repressed ma- 
terial is projected into the partially sleeping 
consciousness, in the case of a myth, it is 
projected either as the birth of a hero or a 
birth-process or as a phantasy of heroism 
and salvation. A myth becomes then really 
a waking dream. 1 Symbolism is the true 

i See on this point Abraham's "Dreams and Myths" 
Rank's — "Myth of the Birth of the Hero." Also my paper 
"Dreams and the Samson Myth" (Int. Zeit. f. Artz Psycho 
Analyse — Vol. II, No. 5) and "The Sexual Symbolism of 
the Cretan Snake Goddess (Psychoanalytic Review, Vol. IV, 

[81] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

language of the thinking and feelings of 
primitive people and unconsciously of civil- 
ized peoples. It has its roots in the uncon- 
scious, since all symbols are identical be- 
cause unconscious thinking is identical. 

The unconscious not only originates in the 
childhood of man, but it may also be said 
to have its origin in the childhood of the 
world. If it were possible to penetrate into 
the mind and motives of prehistoric man, 
such data might be able to throw light upon 
unconscious symbolism in its most primitive 
form and the earliest stages of its develop- 
ment. While the skeletal remains of pre- 
historic man have been subjected to a search- 
ing anatomical investigation on account of 
their comparative abundance, yet the data 
upon the mental activities of the men of pre- 
historic times, by the very reason of their 
remoteness, must be very fragmentary. 1 

No. 3). The best discussion of the entire question is found 
in Freud's "Totem and Taboo." 

i See on this Henry Fairfield Osborne's "Men of the Old 

[82] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

It can be shown on the basis of fairly 
abundant material, particularly in the plas- 
tic arts and paintings in the caverns, that the 
various races of prehistoric times seemed to 
possess, in much the same way that modern 
man possesses, strong yearnings and mo- 
tives, pleasure and pain. Men even in those 
remote times tended to emphasize the sexual 
element and their beautiful color paintings 
in the caverns seemed to show, that even long 
years ago, men attempted to repress reality, 
to break away from it in the struggle for 
existence and from the monotony of life in 
the dark caverns. 

Some of the phallic symbolism of their 
every day utensils is interesting, a symbol- 
ism so often found in dreams. Symbolism 
and consequently even repression, although 
to a less extent than in a more modern 
civilization thus had its origin in the remotest 

Stone Age" — 1915, and my critical review of the same, from 
a psychoanalytic standpoint in the Journal of Abnormal 
Psychology, Vol. II, No. 4. 

[83] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

ages of the past. The symbolism of dreams 
draws its material from this remote ancestry, 
showing how primitive and archaic the un- 
conscious of man is and how often the dream 
is merely a fragment of the mental life of 
our remote ancestors. 

We are now prepared to briefly discuss a 
few primitive myths as projections of mate- 
rial which is repressed in the unconscious of 
man and of the race. 1 

In the myths of the Pueblo dwellers we are 
told, that "According to their Genesis, the 
ancestors of the Pueblo dwellers issued from 
the fourfold underworld through a Sipapu, 
which some regard as a lake, and thence 
journeyed in search of the Middle Place of 
the world, Earth's navel." Here the birth 
symbolism is very evident as in all primitive 
thinking, the application, as in the Fuegian 

i The material utilized here is taken from the "Mythology 
of all Races," Vol. 10, North American Indian, — Hartly 
Burr Alexander, and Vol. II, "Oceanic," by Roland R. 
Dixon. 

[84] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

myth, of an individual birth process to a 
cosmic birth process. 

In the Pueblo mythology, too, the 
"Plumed Serpent" is connected both with 
lightning and fertility and the same identity 
can be detected in the analysis of the Pro- 
metheus myth. In the "highly dramatic 
snake dances of the Hopi Indians, there are 
several acts which seem to represent the 
fructification of the maize by the "Plumed 
Snake." This latter quotation shows that 
the phallic symbolism of the serpent is recog- 
nized by the comparative mythologist as well 
as by the psychoanalyst. 

The natives of Australia are in their cul- 
ture among the lowest people in the world, 
but at the same time they possess extraor- 
dinary complex social organizations and 
elaborate religious ceremonials. They have 
but little repression hence- their myths refer- 
ring to the origin and birth of human beings 
are very literal and not at all symbolized. 

[85] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

"They had no distinct limbs or organs of 
sight, hearing or smell, and did not eat food, 
and presented an appearance of human be- 
ings all doubled up into a rounded mass in 
which just the outline of the different parts 
of the body could be vaguely seen." In an- 
other creation myth, there was absolutely no 
repression, the ocean was derived directly 
from the amniotic liquor. 

In a Polynesian myth, showing the 
CEdipus trend, we see the symbolization of 
the repressed family conflict which so fre- 
quently occurs in the childhood of man, lays 
the foundation for a future neurosis and 
often appears in the dreams of adults. In 
these dreams the father is slain or does not 
appear and the mother is triumphant. 
These over-attachments to one of the family 
group, usually the son to the mother, are 
strongly repressed as the individual develops, 
and forms what is known as the CEdipus 
complex, from the well known Greek 

[86] 



IN PRIMITIVE SOCIETY 

legend. This legend, like the Polynesian 
myth, merely represents the repressed feel- 
ings of the race, the over-love for the mother 
and hate for the father. This Polynesian 
myth is very interesting because it occurs in 
a very primitive race which had the same 
CEdipus legend, as the more cultured 
Greeks, although these two races were sepa- 
rated by immense periods of time. In this 
myth, the father is symbolized as the sky 
and the mother as the earth. 1 

i See on this point, "Mythology of all Races," Vol. 9, 
"Oceanic Myths" in Chapter I, "Myths of Origins and the 
Deluge." 



[87] 



CHAPTER III 

REPRESSED EMOTIONS IN LITERATURE 

It is generally admitted that Russian 
literature abounds in abnormal characters 
and in delineations of nervous and mental 
diseases, and as such it offers interesting and 
valuable material for the psychoanalyst. 
The best examples of these psychopathic and 
neuropathic personalities are found in the 
Russian novel, but occasionally we find this 
morbid tendency in Russian lyric poetry. 
Readers of Lermontoff's "Tamara," which 
is sort of a Russian Lorelei, will find a 
striking resemblance to Heine's famous 
poem in its association of pleasure with pain. 

The best psychopathic examples are 
found in Dostoevsky, who painted abnormal 
men and women in novels of tremendous 
power. Because he himself was an epileptic 
and so understood the disease with all the up- 

[88] 



IN LITERATURE 

setting factors producing the individual at- 
tacks, Dostoevsky described epileptic con- 
vulsions, the ecstatic aura or warning of the 
attacks and the epileptic personality, with 
an astonishing degree of accuracy. For this 
reason, the works of Dostoevsky furnish a 
valuable clinic for the psychoanalyst. 1 

No one but a sufferer from epilepsy could 
have written the astonishingly accurate and 
terse account of an epileptic attack, as it 
appears in "Crime and Punishment." A 
less gifted author or one who did not under- 
stand the disease, would have produced an 
eye-witness's description of an epileptic 
convulsion. Not so Dostoevsky. For him, 
an epileptic attack, as to all epileptics, is not 
objective, it consists merely of a queer and 
sometimes indescribable bodily sensation 
and then a break in consciousness. 

For example, Raskolnikov, after the mur- 
der, is about to make a voluntary declara- 

lSee "A Study of the Epilepsy of Dostoevsky" by L. 
Pierce Clark — Boston Medical and Surgical Journal — 1915. 

[89] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

tion of his crime before the police. He com- 
plains of being dizzy, and then Dostoevsky 
goes on to say: * — "Raskolnikov picked up 
his hat and walked toward the door, but he 
did not reach it. . . . When he recovered 
consciousness, he found himself sitting in a 
chair, supported by some one on the right 
side, while some one else was standing on the 
left, holding a yellowish glass filled with 
yellow water." This is a description of a 
genuine epileptic seizure ; exactly the manner 
in which sufferers from epilepsy character- 
ize their attacks — a queer feeling and then 
they find themselves lying on the ground or 
in a hospital bed. 

Other examples of the portrayal of the 
abnormal mental states are seen in the curi- 
ous religious symbolism of Korolenko's 
"Makar's Dream," the sensual details in 
Kuprin's stories of garrison life and also in 
"The Little Demon" of Feodor Sologub. 

i "Crime and Punishment" Part II. Chapter I — (Con- 
stance Garnett's translation). 

[90] 



IN LITERATURE 

Both as a novel and a psychiatrical docu- 
ment, "The Little Demon" is a masterpiece. 
Briefly, the story states that the schoolmaster 
Peredonov has been promised an inspector- 
ship of schools if he will marry his mistress 
and around this slight nucleus there develops 
the various ramifications of his mental dis- 
ease. Out of this coveted inspectorship, the 
various delusions arise, elaborate themselves 
more and more and become more complex 
as the different situations of the novel de- 
velop. The thwarted desires of the school- 
master finally crystallize into clearly formed 
delusions of persecution; in other words, 
Peredonov becomes the victim of a mental 
disease known as paranoia. In the history 
of psychiatry this term has had wide varia- 
tions and been loosely used, but in individ- 
uals of Peredonov's personality, it refers to 
a type of mental reaction where the affected 
subjects are inclined to see a sinister mean- 
ing in things and to misinterpret actual 
occurrences. 

[91] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

In Peredonov's case, as in all paranoiacs, 
the delusions are the logical outgrowth of 
actual situations in the life of the individual. 
These actual situations, however, are never 
misinterpreted unless there occurs, as in the 
case of Peredonov, what may be termed an 
overloading of each situation with certain 
emotions and unfulfilled desires. Thus the 
delusion formation is not the disease, it is 
merely the symptom, the outward expression 
of the underlying pathological mental state. 
'From this standpoint "The Little Demon" 
is not only a masterly novel but also a psy- 
chiatrical document of great value. 

All who have carefully analyzed the gen- 
esis and development of paranoiac delusions 
have seen Peredonovs in realitv and have 
noted their over-suspiciousness and misinter- 
pretation of actual life situations. 

With the exception of Maupassant's "Le 
Horla" I know of no work in prose literature 
in which the complicated skeins of a mental 

[92] 



IN LITERATURE 

disorder are so cleverly unraveled as in this 
novel by Feodor Sologub. There is an in- 
teresting parallel, too, between the visual 
hallucinations of the "Being" in "Le Horla" 
and the hallucinations of the "Nedotikomka" 
in the "Little Demon." 

Another example of an accurate portrayal 
of a pathological mental state, both in the 
reactions of the individual involved and of 
the means utilized to bring this individual 
out of his abnormal mentality, is found in 
Goncharoff s "Oblomoff." 

Oblomoff is not only a product of supreme 
merit, parallel to the best work of Tolstoy, 
Dostoevsky and Turgenieff , but it possesses 
a valuable psychoanalytic interest in that it 
portrays a certain type of repressed or shut 
in human character and shows the reactions 
of that character to inner conflicts and upset- 
ting emotional factors. The author pre- 
sents a valuable portrayal of a shut-in or 
introverted personality, and demonstrates 

[93] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

how love acted on this introverted individual 
in the same manner in which a psychoanaly- 
sis works. 

This book is therefore of great interest to 
the psychoanalytic physician. Intuitively 
the author portrayed a certain type of neu- 
rosis, probably the outgrowth of his own ex- 
periences. Olga is really the psychoanalyst 
and Oblomoff the patient. The genius of 
the author has unconsciously traced the de- 
velopment of a neurosis and its conclusion 
that is more slowly and painfully reached by 
the psychoanalyst. We are in the presence 
of a unique and at the same time a highly 
scientific conception. 

In order to understand the book and its 
relation to the writer and his time, it be- 
comes necessary to say a few words concern- 
ing the author, Goncharoff. 1 Kropotkin 
states that the most popular novel of Gon- 

i Much of what follows concerning Goncharoff is taken 
from the admirable account in Kropotkin'* "Ideal* and 
Realities in Russian Literature." 

[94] 



IN LITERATURE 

charoff is "Oblomoff," which like Turge- 
nieff's "Fathers and Sons" and Tolstoy's 
"War and Peace" and "Resurrection," is one 
of the profoundest productions of the last 
half century. "It is so thoroughly Russian, 
so Russian indeed," he says, "that only a 
Russian can fully appreciate it, but it is at 
the same time universally human, as it intro- 
duces a type which is almost as universal as 
that of Hamlet or Don Quixote." It is 
here that we see the real significance of the 
novel, it is the "universally human," as 
Oblomoff represents a type of character, or 
even of disease, which is represented by 
withdrawal from reality and living and lux- 
uriating in day dreams. 

It appears that the novel portrays the 
close connection between its principal char- 
acter and the author himself, in fact, it 
seems, as in so many supreme works of art, 
to be nothing more than Goncharoff 's pro- 
jection of his own inner feelings in the form 

[95] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

of a literary creation. In his short auto- 
biography, Goncharoff states . . . "My 
people did not let me have even a wish, all 
had been foreseen and attended to long 
since. The old servants, with my nurse at 
their head, looked into my eyes to guess my 
wishes, trying to remember what I liked best 
when I was with him, where my writing table 
ought to be put, which chair I preferred to 
the others, how to make my bed. The cook 
tried to remember which dishes I liked in 
my childhood . . . and all could not admire 
me enough." 

When the novel was published in Russia 
in 1859, it made an extraordinary impression. 
"All educated Russia read Oblomoff and 
discussed Oblomoffism. Every one recog- 
nized something of himself in Oblomoff, felt 
the disease of Oblomoff in his own veins . . . 
and now forty years afterward, one can read 
and re-read 'Oblomoff' with the same pleas- 
ure of nearly half a century ago, and it has 

[96] 



IN LITERATURE 

lost nothing of its meaning, while it has ac- 
quired many new ones. There are always 
living Oblomoffs." 

There are always living Oblomoffs! 
How true! We are attracted to Hamlet 
and Faust again and again because they 
represent universal types, every one has 
something of Hamlet or Faust within him. 
So is Oblomoff a universal type. The psy- 
choanalyst meets with Oblomoffs continually 
in his practice. Every neurotic, who lives in 
his day dreams, who has withdrawn more or 
less from reality, who as a consequence dis- 
plays the inhibition and inertia of introver- 
sion is an Oblomoff. The character of 
Oblomoff presents such valuable material for 
the psychoanalyst, because it portrays the 
neurosis of a real human being. 

Before proceeding to the analysis of the 
novel, it might be well to give a short out- 
line of the case of a neurotic patient, so that 
it may be compared with the hero in Gon- 

[97] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

charoff's production. It will be noticed, 
that the artificial creation cannot be differ- 
entiated from the real individual. 

It refers to the case of a young man who 
might be termed a modern Oblomoff thus 
showing that the character of Oblomoff is 
not limited to any particular time or race. 
He was an extreme neurotic, who for years 
had withdrawn more and more from reality, 
had built a sort of mental Chinese wall 
around his mind, and as in a forbidden city, 
had preferred to luxuriate in his day dreams 
rather than come into touch with reality. In 
his case as in Oblomoff's there is no balanced 
proportion of day-dreaming and realistic 
functioning, the realistic does not control his 
day-dreaming but rather the day-dreaming 
controls the realistic. 

From his early childhood, as in Oblomoff 
and in Goncharoff's Autobiography, his rel- 
atives absolutely directed his everyday life. 
He did everything slowly and with a great 

[98] 



IN LITERATURE 

deal of inhibition and when completely dom- 
inated by his day-dreams, he would display 
intense inertia and become completely in- 
active. 

This living in day-dreams and idly allow- 
ing the day-dreams to represent wishes or 
desires which are impossible of fulfillment in 
reality, is termed "autistic thinking," a term 
introduced by the Swiss physician Bleuler. 
This autistic thinking is universal, from the 
child to the adult. It exists in all grades of 
intensity in human beings. In normal and 
healthy individuals it is kept within certain 
limits by logical thinking, the autistic think- 
ing never gains the upper hand. When the 
balance between the two is upset, a neurosis 
develops. The neurotic withdraws from 
reality and lives in the unreality of the day- 
dream, but can always by an effort bring 
himself back into touch with reality again. 
To use a Miltonic phrase, the neurotic is 
constantly "hatching vain empires." 

[99] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

In extreme cases, the individual is com- 
pletely dominated by his autistic thinking, 
he loses all contact with reality, lives in his 
day-dreams, his fairy tales; and this living 
in the fairy tales may produce a delusional 
state which the subject is unable to expel. 
Such a person is insane, the victim of a 
mental disease because he lives his fairy tale, 
it is real to him, he believes in it and conse- 
quently no amount of reasoning or logic can 
shake his belief. Such a person, in technical 
terms, lacks insight. It is thus that certain 
individuals develop the belief that they are 
great personages, a king or a queen, Napo- 
leon, Jesus. On the surface, the thinking 
or ideas of such persons appear sheer non- 
sense, something absolutely impossible is 
imagined and believed to be real. 

A beautiful example in contemporary lit- 
erature, of the manner in which autistic 
thinking may completely dominate the per- 
sonality and so lead to a complete with- 

[100] 



IN LITERATURE 

drawal from reality, can be found in Lord 
Dunsany's "The Coronation of Mr. Thomas 
Shap." 1 Mr. Shap's occupation consisted 
of the dull monotony of a prosaic clerk 
until he began to first perceive "the very 
beastliness of his occupation" and "from 
that moment he withdrew his dreams 
from it" and "took little flights with his 
fancy at first; dwelt all day in his dreamy 
way on fields and rivers lying in the sun- 
light." Little by little he withdrew more 
and more from reality, "his soul was no 
longer in them." He began to lead another 
life, neglected his business, in his own imagi- 
nation he lived in scenes of oriental splendor 
and finally dominated them as king "throned 
on one amethyst." Here we have an exquis- 
ite picture of the paranoiac domination of 
the personality of an individual who has be- 
come dissatisfied with reality, in which the 
balance of his own thoughts and of coming 

i Lord Dunsany— "The Book of Wonder." 

[101] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

into touch with reality, was completely upset. 
It will be seen that there is no hard and 
fast line to be drawn between the autistic 
thinking, the repressed ideas of normal indi- 
viduals and of cases of nervous and mental 
disease. In normal individuals, there is a 
constant balancing: there always remain 
many points of contact in reality; in the 
abnormal cases, these points of contact grow 
less and less, until they entirely disappear. 
But autistic thinking, if well balanced, is 
not absolutely dangerous. A neurotic dif- 
fers from a normal individual in that he pos- 
sesses only isolated points of contact with 
reality. As Bleuler states it— "A humanity 
without autistic thinking could not have de- 
veloped . . . the autistic contains most of 
our ideals. The autistic forms of thinking 
have for thousands of years given form to 
human ethics ; they have created ideals which 
would be impossible to logical thinking, dim 
ideals certainly, but guiding stars towards 

[102] 



IN LITERATURE 

which mankind may direct his groping 
way." l 

The sleeping beauty motive, as it runs 
through imaginative fairy literature, is also 
a type of autistic thinking and may be di- 
vided into different forms. In the first, as 
exemplified by Catulle Mendes's exquisite 
tale (The Sleeping Beauty), the Princess 
had been dreaming beautiful dreams for a 
hundred years and in her dreams she is 
"adored by a lover more handsome than any 
of the Princes of the earth; I do not gain 
anything by coming out of my enchantment." 
— Then the Princess goes on sleeping and 
dreaming again. In the other form as in 
Tennyson's "Day Dream," the Princess is 
awakened from her sleep by the magic kiss 
of the Prince and instead of returning to 
sleep, she remains awake, — "And deep into 
the dying day, The happy Princess followed 
him." 

i E. Bleuler — "Autistic Thinking" — American Journal of 
Insanity (Special number). 

[103] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

It can thus be clearly seen, how the wish 
fulfillment and symbolism of fairy tales is 
parallel with what occurs in neurotic sub- 
jects. In the latter, autistic thinking or 
day-dreaming may also take two forms, the 
one in which the subject prefers to remain 
shut in, as in the stupor of dementia precox, 
and the second, in which there is a constant 
struggle to break through the day-dreaming 
shell, as in hysteria and various psychoneu- 
roses. This final triumph can only be 
brought about through a successful psycho- 
analysis. The fact that the same mental 
mechanism is found in fairy tales as in 
neurotic subjects, is explained by the fact 
that the makers of fairy tales struggled with 
the same conflicts as the nervously ill and 
projected their conflicts into imaginative lit- 
erature. As stated by Riklin, 1 "Fairy 
tales are inventions of the directly utilized, 
immediately conceived experiences of the 

i Franz Riklin — "Wish Fulfillment and Symbolism in 
Fairy Tales." 

[104] 



IN LITERATURE 

primitive human soul and general human 
tendency to wish-fulfillment, which we find 
again in modern fiction only somewhat more 
complicated and garbed in different forms." 
In fact, dreams often resemble fairy tales 
and such types of dreams may be termed 
fairy tales from the unconscious. The sym- 
bolism is universal; it is constructed from 
the unconscious and projected either in 
primitive fairy tales and myths or in dreams 
and the various neuroses. 

The first example of the application of 
psychoanalysis to a novel, is Freud's analy- 
sis of Wilhelm Jensen's "Gradiva." In 
Oblomoff, as in Gradiva, the author knew 
nothing of the theoretical or technical as- 
pects of psychoanalysis, but the novel in 
each case not only accurately portrayed a 
neurotic disease but showed how the spon- 
taneous reactions to a love affair could re- 
lieve a neurosis. The "Gradiva" idea was 
not entirely the product of the author's fancy, 

[105] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

but may occur in a genuine neurosis, as I 
have the opportunity to observe. In this 
case the dream of a neurotic young girl 
strongly resembled in its details and sym- 
bolism, the young archaeologist's dream in 
"Gradiva." 

In another case, a young neurotic dreamed 
of his physician seated at a rough table carv- 
ing a lotus flower on a little oval piece of 
wood, with a small knife resembling a scal- 
pel. The symbolism here is clear. The 
•scalpel indicated that the psychoanalytic 
physician worked with human material like 
a surgeon, in fact it symbolized the psycho- 
analysis as surgery of the mind, while 
the act of carving symbolized the psycho- 
analytic treatment. In both cases the 
dreams represented the repressed emotions 
of the individual, symbolized in the bas- 
relief of the dream. 

In both the novels, too, as will be subse- 
quently described in detail, the girl acted as 

[106] 



IN LITERATURE 

the psychoanalytic physician; in "Gradiva" 
she cured the delusion, in "OblomofT" she 
almost completely relieved the shut-in and 
repressed personality. As Freud so well 
states it — "The accomplishment of the task 
is easier for 'Gradiva' than for the physi- 
cian; she is in this connection in a posi- 
tion which might be called ideal from many 
points of view. The physician who does not 
fathom his patient in advance, and does not 
possess within himself, as conscious memory, 
what is working in the patient's unconscious, 
must call to his aid a complicated technique 
in order to remove the disadvantage. The 
disturbance disappears by being traced back 
to its origin. Analysis brings cure at the 
same time." 1 

After these long but rather necessary in- 
troductory remarks, we may now proceed to 
the analysis of OblomofT. 2 

OblomofT was a Russian gentleman of 

i S. Freud— "Delusion and Dream"— 1918. 
2 The translation used is by C. J. Hogarth. 

[107] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

moderate means, living in Petrograd about 
the middle of the nineteenth century. The 
central theme of the book lies in the effort 
of Oblomoff himself, of his friends and of 
the girl, Olga, to lead Oblomoff out of his 
shut-in or introverted life, into touch with 
reality. In other words the book represents 
a struggle between introversion or the tend- 
ency to live within oneself and extroversion 
or the effort to make interests flow outward, 
to attach themselves to objects and to live 
m events in the outer world of reality. It 
is here that the profound psychoanalytic 
significance and insight of the book lies. 
The mental attitude towards his surround- 
ings, the inertia, is well shown in the follow- 
ing description : — 

"On the walls and around the pictures 
there hung cobwebs coated with dust; the 
mirrors, instead of reflecting, would have 
more usefully served as tablets for recording 
memoranda; every mat was freely spotted 

[108] 



IN LITERATURE 

with stains ; on the sofa there lay a forgotten 
towel, and on the table (as on most morn- 
ings) , a plate, a salt cellar, a half eaten crust 
of bread, and some scattered crumbs — all of 
which had failed to be cleared away after 
last night's supper. Indeed, were it not for 
the plate, for a recently smoked pipe that 
was propped against the bed, and for the 
recumbent form of OblomofT himself, one 
might have imagined that the place con- 
tained not a single living soul, so dusty and 
discolored did everything look, and so lack- 
ing were any active traces of the presence of 
a human being. True, on the whatnots 
there were two or three open books, while a 
newspaper was tossing about, and the bureau 
bore on its top an inkstand and a few pens ; 
but the pages at which the books were open 
were covered with dust and beginning to 
turn yellow (thus proving that they had long 
been tossed aside) , the date of the newspaper 
belonged to the previous year, and from 

[109] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

the ink-stand, whenever a pen happened to 
be dipped therein, there arose with a fright- 
ened buzz, only a derelict fly." 

In spite of this mental inertia, his apathy, 
these characteristics are superficial. He 
gave himself up again to his day dreams, he 
lives in them and these day dreams pass into 
genuine dreams in the same imperceptible 
manner unknown to the dreamer, as Raskol- 
nikov passes into an epileptic attack. 

The author goes on to state further de- 
tails of Oblomoffs day-dreaming — "But in 
Oblomoff s study, all remained silent as the 
tomb. Zakhar peeped through the chink of 
the door, and perceived that his master was 
lying prone on the sofa, with his head rest- 
ing on the palm of his hand. The valet en- 
tered the room. 

" 'Why have you lain down again?' he 
asked. 

" 'Do not disturb me : cannot you see that 
I am reading?' was OblomofT's abrupt reply. 

[110] 



IN LITERATURE 

" ' Nay, but you ought to wash, and then 
to write that letter!' urged Zakhar, deter- 
mined not to be shaken off. 

'Yes, I suppose I ought. I will do so 
presently. Just now I am engaged in 
thought.' 

"As a matter of fact, he did read a page 
of the book which was lying open — a page 
which had turned yellow with a month's ex- 
posure. That done, he laid it down and 
yawned. 

" 'How it all wearies me!' he whispered, 
stretching, and then drawing up his legs. 
Glancing at the ceiling as once more he re- 
lapsed into a voluptuous state of coma, he 
said to himself with a momentary sternness : 
'No — business first.' Then he rolled over, 
and clasped his hands behind his head. 

"As he lay there he thought of his plans 
for improving his property. Swiftly he 
passed in review certain grave and funda- 
mental schemes affecting his plow land 

[in] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

and its taxation: after which he elaborated 
a new and stricter course to be taken against 
laziness and vagrancy on the part of the 
peasantry, and then passed to sundry ideas 
for ordering his own life in the country. 
"First of all, he became engrossed in a 
design for a new house. Eagerly he 
lingered over a probable disposition of the 
rooms and fixed in his mind the dimensions 
of the dining room and the billiard-room, 
and determined which way the windows of 
4iis study must face. Indeed, he even gave 
a thought to the furniture and to the carpets. 
Next, he designed a wing for the building, 
calculating the number of guests whom the 
wing would accommodate, and set aside 
proper sites for the stables, the coach houses, 
and the servants' quarters ; finally he turned 
his attention to the garden. The old lime 
and oak trees should all be left as they were, 
but the apple trees and pear trees should 
be done away with, and succeeded by acacias. 

[112] 



IN LITERATURE 

Also, he gave a moment's consideration to 
the idea of a park, but after calculating the 
cost of its upkeep, came to the conclusion 
that such a luxury would prove too expensive 
— wherefore he passed to the designing of 
orangeries and aviaries. 

"So vividly did these attractive visions 
of the future development of his estate flit 
before his eyes that he came to fancy himself 
already settled there, and engaged in wit- 
nessing the result of several years' working 
of his schemes. 

"On a fair summer's evening he seemed to 
be sitting at a tea-table on the terrace of 
Oblomoffka — sitting under the canopy of 
leafy shade which the sun was powerless to 
penetrate. From a long pipe in his hand 
he was lazily inhaling smoke, and reveling 
both in the delightful view which stretched 
beyond the circle of trees and in the coolness 
and the quiet of his surroundings. In the 
distance some fields were turning to gold, as 

[113] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

the sun, setting behind a familiar birch- 
grove, tinged to red the mirror-like surface 
of the lake. From the fields a mist had 
risen, for the chill of evening was falling, 
and dusk approaching apace. To his ears, 
at intervals, came the clatter of peasantry 
as they returned homewards, and at the en- 
trance gates the servants of the establish- 
ment were sitting at ease, while from their 
vicinity came the sound of echoing voices 
and laughter, the playing of balalaiki, 1 and 
"the chattering of girls as they pursued the 
sport of gorielki. 2 Around him, also, his 
little ones were frisking — at times climbing 
on his knee and hanging about his neck; 
while behind the samovar 3 was seated the 
real ruler of all that his eyes were beholding 
— his divinity, a woman, his wife! . . . And 
in the dining-room, a room at once elegant 
and simply appointed — a cheerful fire was 

i Three stringed, lute-like instruments. 

2 A sort of catch-as-catch-can. 

3 Tea-urn. (Notes of the translator.) 

[114] 



IN LITERATURE 

glowing and Zakhar now promoted to the 
dignity of a major-domo, and adorned with 
whiskers turned wholly gray, was laying a 
large, round table to a pleasant accompany- 
ing tinkle of crystal and silver as he ar- 
ranged, here a decanter and there a fork. 
"Presently the dreamer saw his wife and 
himself sit down to a bountiful supper. 
Yes, and with them was Schtoltz, the com- 
rade of his youth, his unchanging friend, 
with other well-known faces ; lastly, he could 
see the inmates of the home retiring to 

JL Co L» • • • 

"Oblomoff's features blushed with delight 
at the vision. So clear, so vivid, so poetical 
was it all that for a moment he lay with his 
face buried in the sofa cushions. Suddenly 
there had come upon him a dim longing for 
love and happiness ; suddenly he had become 
athirst for the fields and hills of his native 
place, for his home, for his wife, for chil- 
dren — 

[115] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

"After lying face down wards for a dick 
ment or two, he turned upon his back. His 
features were alight with generous emotion, 
and for the time being, he was happy. 

"Again the charming seductiveness of the 
sleep-waking enfolded him in its embrace. 
He pictured to himself a small colony of 
friends who should come and settle in the 
villages and farms within a radius of fifteen 
or twenty versts of his country house. 
Every day they should visit one another's 
houses — whether to dine or to sup or to 
dance; until everywhere around him he 
would be able to see onlv bright faces 
framed in sunny days — faces which should 
be ever free of care and wrinkles, and round, 
and merry, and ruddy, and double-chinned, 
and of unfailing appetite. In all his neigh- 
borhood there should be constant summer 
tide, constant gayety, unfailing good fare, 
the joys of perennial lassitude. 

" 'My God. my God!' he cried in the full- 

[116] 



IN LITERATURE 

ness of his delight: and with that he awoke. 
Once more to his ears came the cries of the 
hawkers in the courtyard as they vended 
coal, sand, and potatoes : once more he could 
hear some one begging for subscriptions to 
build a church; once more from a neighbor- 
ing building which was in the course of erec- 
tion there streamed a babel of workmen's 
shouts, mingled with the clatter of tools." 

The reverie gradually faded into a real day 
dream, which has all the characteristics of a 
genuine dream — a wish fulfillment projected 
into the future. 

The medical advice for this neurosis is in- 
teresting, but inaccurate, according to our 
modern standards. 

"You must avoid emotion of everv kind, 
for that sort of thing is sure to militate 
against a successful cure. Try, rather, to 
divert yourself with riding, with dancing, 
with moderate exercise in the open air, and 
with pleasant conversation — more especially 

[117] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

conversation with the opposite sex. These 
things were designed to make your heart 
beat more lightly, and to experience none 
but agreeable emotions. Again, you must 
lay aside all reading and writing. Rent a 
villa which faces south and lies embowered 
in flowers, and surround yourself also with 
an atmosphere of music and women." The 
doctor then goes on to give the advice of 
traveling for curing the neurosis, not realiz- 
ing that a neurotic carries his conflicts with 
him wherever he goes. 

In his dreams he regresses to his whole 
past life, he reviews it from childhood up, 
just as a neurotic individual always does. 
This affords the author an opportunity to 
make clear the background out of which the 
shut-in personality developed and in one as- 
tonishing passage, the whole of Oblomoff 's 
emotional development is summarized and 
described. 

"Moreover, should the boy at any time 

[118] 



IN LITERATURE 

want anything, he had three or four serv- 
ants to do his bidding; and in this fashion 
he never learnt what it was to do a single 
thing for himself. 

"Yet in the end his parents' fond solici- 
tude wearied him, for at no time should he 
even cross the courtyard, or descend the 
staircase, without hearing himself followed 
by shouts of ' Where are you going to, Illya?' 
or 'How can you do that?' or 'You will fall 
and hurt yourself !' Thus pampered like an 
exotic plant in a greenhouse, he grew up 
slowly and drowsily, and in a way which 
turned his energies inward, and gradually 
caused them to wither.' ' 

Like Zoe in Jensen's novel u Gradiva," 
Olga has upon Oblomoff the effect of a psy- 
choanalysis. She acts upon his repressed 
and introverted life in a way a chemical fer- 
ment or catalyzer acts, she wishes to attract 
to herself the repressed and shut-in emotions 
of Oblomoff. But as we shall clearly see, 

[119] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

she only partially succeeds, for Oblomoff is 
only incompletely drawn out of the prison- 
walls of his shut-in mind and then his neu- 
rosis sinks again to a lower cultural level, he 
reverts to the purely nutritional tendencies 
of childhood. The love affair is thus de- 
scribed. . . . 

"From that time forth she lived in him 
alone, while he, for his part, racked his brains 
to avoid incurring the loss of her esteem. 
Whenever she detected in his soul — and she 
could probe that soul very deeply — the least 
trace of its former characteristics, she would 
work for him to heap reproaches for his leth- 
argy and fear of life. Just as he was about 
to yawn, as he was actually opening his 
mouth for the purpose, her astonished glance 
would transfix him, and cause his mouth to 
snap with a click which jarred his teeth. 
Still more did he hasten to resume his alac- 
rity whenever he perceived that his lassitude 
was communicating itself to her, and threat- 

[120] 



IN LITERATURE 

ening to render her cold and contemptuous. 
Instantly he would undergo a revival of 
strenuous activity; and then the shadow be- 
tween them would disappear, and mutual 
sympathy once more beat in strong, clear 
accord. Yet this solicitude on his part had 
not, as yet, its origin in the magic ring of 
love. Indeed the effect of his charmed toils 
was a negative rather than a positive. True, 
he no longer slept all day — on the contrary, 
he rode, read, walked, and even thought of 
resuming his writing and his agricultural 
schemes; yet the ultimate direction, the in- 
most significance, of his life still remained 
confined to the sphere of good intentions. 
Particularly disturbing did he find it when- 
ever Olga plied him with some particular 
question and demanded of him, as of a pro- 
fessor, full satisfaction of her curiosity. 

"This occurred frequently, and arose not 
out of pedantry on her part, but a desire 
to know the right and wrong of things. 

[121] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

"At times a given question would absorb 
her even to the point of forgetting her con- 
sideration for Oblomoff. For instance, on 
one occasion, when she had besought his opin- 
ion concerning double stars, and he was in- 
cautious enough to refer her to Herschel, he 
was dispatched to purchase the great author- 
ity's book, and commanded to read it 
through, and to explain the same to her full 
satisfaction. On another occasion he was 
rash enough to let slip a word or two con- 
cerning various schools of painting: where- 
fore he had to undergo another week's read- 
ing and explaining and also to pay sundry 
visits to the Hermitage Museum. In the 
end how he trembled whenever she asked 
him a question!" 

This is the defeated transference of 
Oblomoff; here it is that love fails. This 
emotional transference, which is really only 
the acknowledged sympathy between two in- 
dividuals, forms the basis of all love affairs, 

[122] 



IN LITERATURE 

and love affairs often have an unhappy end- 
ing because this transference fails. Why? 
Because in every love affair it is necessary 
for one of the parties involved to cut loose 
from the moorings or attachments to the 
members of their own family, to their blood 
relations. Where this fails or only partially 
succeeds, there arises both a conscious and 
unconscious mental conflict during the 
period of the love affair and in all these 
cases it leads to a severe neurotic anxiety. 
It is for this reason so many young people 
have a so-called "nervous breakdown" dur- 
ing a period of betrothal; the acknowledged 
sympathy, the transference between the 
two sexes remaining incomplete. In the 
young man it is incomplete because of too 
strong attachment to the mother, in the 
young woman because of too strong attach- 
ment to the father. While in these cases, 
the neurotic anxiety is conscious, yet the 
mental conflict, the over-attachment to the 

[123] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

parent of the opposite sex, is very strong 
and deeply imbedded in the unconscious 
where it can only be detected through a psy- 
choanalysis. As a rule this over-attachment 
is very clearly seen in dreams, where the 
parent appears in a more or less disguised 
form or sometimes in a condensation, like a 
composite photograph, of the parent and the 
loved one. 

This over-attachment to the family group 
is very beautifully portrayed in OblomofFs 
first dream. He dreamed that he was seven 
years old and awoke in his little cot at home. 

"OblomofFs nurse had long been waiting 
for him to awake, and now she began to 
draw on for him his stockings. This he re- 
fused to allow her to do: which end he at- 
tained by frisking and kicking, while she 
tried to catch hold of his leg, and the pair 
laughed joyously together. Finally, she 
lifted him on her lap, and washed him and 
combed his hair; after which she conducted 

[124] 






IN LITERATURE 

him to his mother. On seeing his long dead 
parent, the sleeping Oblomoff' s form trem- 
bled with delight and affection, and from 
under his unconscious eyelids there stole and 
remained two burning tears. . . . 

"Upon him his mother showered affection- 
ate kisses, and gazed at him with tender so- 
licitude to see whether his eyes were clear 
and healthy. Does he in any way ail? she 
inquired. Had he (this to his nurse) slept 
quietly, or had he lain awake all night? had 
he had any dreams? Had he been at all 
feverish ? Lastly, she took him by the hand, 
and led him to the sacred ikon. Kneeling 
with one arm around his form, she prompted 
him in the words of the prayers, while the 
boy repeated them with scanty attention, 
since he preferred, rather, to turn his eyes to 
the windows, whence the freshness and scent 
of a lilac-tree was flooding the room. 

" 'Shall we go for a walk, to-day, mama?' 
suddenly he asked. 

[125] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

" 'Yes, darling/ she replied hastily, but 
kept her gaze fixed upon the ikon, and hur- 
riedly concluded the sacred formula. Yet 
into the words of that formula her very soul 
was projected, whereas the little one re- 
peated them only in nonchalant fashion." 

Thus Oblomoff is merely autistic thinking 
and his dreams are regressions to the earlier 
and happier days of his childhood, when he 
was moored to the various members of the 
family, — that is the dreams were genuine 
wish fulfillments. He is unhappy now, he 
lives within himself because he is no longer 
a child, his real childhood is slumbering in 
his adult unconscious and only appears like 
a living being in the form of a dream. The 
disease "the apathetic malady of Oblo- 
moffka" is what would be termed in psycho- 
pathology an introversion neurosis, which 
has all degrees of intensity and which is man- 
ifested by the individual slowly shutting 
himself off more and more from reality, 

[126] 



IN LITERATURE 

finally sinking into and living completely in 
day dreams. Under these conditions, real- 
ity loses its hold and the inner world of un- 
reality finally assumes a dominating power. 
The result is inevitable, a mental inertia a 
lack of will power, what the French term 
aboulia. 

As Jung expresses it — "Whoever intro- 
verts, that is to say, who ever takes away 
from a real object without putting in its 
place a real compensation is overtaken by 
the inevitable results of introversion." * 

So it was with Oblomoff. The fatalistic 
inevitable results of his introversion are ex- 
pressed in the following passage. ... 

"Such the philosophy which our Plato of 
Oblomoffka elaborated for the purpose of 
lulling himself to sleep amid the problems 
and the stern demands of duty and of des- 
tiny. He had been bred and nourished to 
play the part, not of a gladiator in the arena 

i C. G. Jung "Psychology of the Unconscious" — 1916. 

[127] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

but of a peaceful onlooker at the struggle. 
Never could his diffident, lethargic spirit 
have faced either the raptures or the blows 
of life. Hence he expressed only one of its 
aspects, and had no mind either to succeed in 
it, or to change anything in it, or to repent 
of his decision. As the years flowed on, both 
emotions and repining came to manifest 
themselves at rarer and rarer intervals, until, 
by quiet, imperceptible degrees he became 
finally interned in the plain, otiose tomb of 
retirement which he had fashioned with his 
own hands, even as desert anchorites who 
have turned from the world dig for them- 
selves a material sepulcher. Of reorganiz- 
ing his estate, and removing hither with his 
household, he had given up all thought. 
The steward whom Schtoltz had placed in 
charge of Oblomoff ka, regularly sent him the 
income therefrom, and the peasantry prof- 
fered him flour and poultry at Christmas- 

[128] 



IN LITERATURE 

tide, and everything on the estate was pros- 
pering." 

Thus his introversion has plunged him into 
a lower cultural level where the sublimations 
of civilized society, of intellect, of logical 
thinking mean nothing to him. His life, his 
reactions, his elan vitale, to use the Berg- 
sonian phrase, became a mere nutritional 
craving. . . . "He has succeeded in escap- 
ing life, in driving a bargain with it, and en- 
suring himself an inevitable seclusion." 
How true this phrase is. . . . "He suc- 
ceeded in escaping life." For psychoanaly- 
sis shows that that is the purpose of intro- 
version, to escape the conflicts of life, of 
reality, by building a mental Chinese wall 
around the mind. In fact, a neurotic is so 
inaccessible because of this Chinese wall. 
The neurotic turns away from reality, he 
takes a flight in disease, runs under cover so 
to speak and thus secures safety. Introver- 

[129] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

sion is a method of escaping from reality. 

Concerning Olga's failure to draw Oblo- 
moff out of his introversion, Oblomoff him- 
self gives the hint of the reason of his failure 
in the following words — "Alas!" was Oblo- 
moff's repetition, "Olga wishes forever to be 
on the move. Apparently she cares nothing 
about dreaming over the poetical phases of 
life, or losing herself in reveries. She is 
like Schtoltz. It would seem as though the 
two had conspired to live life at top speed." 

It seems, therefore, fair to assume, that if 
the character of Olga had been a little more 
ideal, a little more poetic in connection with 
her practical ability, she would have suc- 
ceeded. Therefore the love-transference 
only partially appealed to Oblomoff; only 
partially awakened his emotions. He could 
not come into contact with the more sub- 
limated aspects of love, he could not be re- 
awakened from the slumber of his idle 

[130] 



IN LITERATURE 

thinking and so regressed to that childhood 
to which his day-dreams were totally at- 
tached. He went the path of least resist- 
ance and slipped back into his introversion; 
in the words of the author, he was "deter- 
mined to be powerless." A year and a half 
later, Oblomoff was sitting in his dark, 
murky rooms, in the same condition as when 
he was first introduced to us. 

So Oblomoff married his landlady because 
his nutritional cravings and desires drew 
him back to the childhood of his dreams. 
Food alone, and not the higher sublimated 
pleasures of love and intellectual interest, 
were self sufficient for him. He does not 
have to go beyond his own body for satis- 
faction, his pleasures are found in the expec- 
tation of eating and in the taste of food. 
He thus becomes tremendously introverted, 
shut-in, like those cases of dementia praecox 
which in the terminal stages of their disease 

[131] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

are interested only in the immediate pleas- 
ures of the body. Oblomoff 's surroundings 
are described as follows: 

"Hams hung from the ceiling of the store- 
room (to avoid damage by mice), and, with 
them, cheeses, loaves of sugar, dried fish, and 
bags of nuts and preserved mushrooms. On 
a table stood tubs of butter, pots of sour 
cream, baskets of apples, and God knows 
what else besides, for it would require the 
pen of a second Homer to describe in full, 
and in detail, all that had become accumu- 
lated in the various corners and on the vari- 
ous floors of this little nest of domestic life. 

"Nor was his coffee prepared for him with 
less care, attention, and skill than had been 
the case before he had changed his old quar- 
ters for his present ones. Giblet soup, mac- 
aroni with Parmesan cheese, soup concocted 
of kvass and herbs, home-fed pullets . . . 
all these dishes succeeded one another in reg- 
ular rotation, and by so doing helped to make 

[132] 



IN LITERATURE 

agreeable breaks in the otherwise monoto- 
nous routine of the little establishment." . . . 
His mental condition is portrayed in the 
following passage — 

"Thus Oblomoff lived in a sort of gilded 
cage — a cage within which, as in a diorama, 
the only changes included alternations of 
night and day and of the seasons. Of 
changes, the disturbing kind which stir up 
the sediment from the bottom of life's bowl — 
a sediment only too frequently both bitter 
and obnoxious — there were none. Ever 
since the day when Schtoltz had cleared him 
of debt, and Tarentiev and Tarentiev's 
friend had taken themselves off for good, 
every adverse element had disappeared from 
Oblomoff's existence, and there surrounded 
him only good, kind, sensible folk who had 
agreed to underpin his existence with theirs, 
and to help him not to notice it, nor to feel 
it, as it pursued its even course. Every- 
thing was, as it were, at peace, and of that 

[133] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

peace, that inertia, OblomofT represented 
the complete, the natural, embodiment and 
expression. After passing in review and 
considering his mode of life, he had sunk 
deeper and deeper therein, until finally he 
had come to the conclusion that he had no 
farther to go, and nothing farther to seek, 
and that the ideal of his life would best be 
preserved where he was — albeit without 
poetry, without those finer shades where- 
with his imagination had once painted for 
•him a spacious, careless course of manorial 
life on his own estate among his own peas- 
antry and servants.'' 

In his introversion, he retraces his mental 
development, he regresses to his childhood 
in his dreams because he loves his childhood, 
because he was happy then, he wishes to be 
there again and since he cannot have his 
childhood in reality he has it in his dreams. 
He does not identify himself with his en- 

[134] 



IN LITERATURE 

vironment, his environment is undisturbed 
and means nothing to him. 

Oblomoff is merely an exaggerated form 
of what often tempore rily occurs in normal 
individuals, but here in the latter without 
any final breaking away from reality because 
of the perfect balancing between logical 
thinking and autistic thinking. 

This retreat or flight from reality has in 
addition, a profound social significance. 
All of us are more or less dominated by day 
dreams and these day dreams technically ex- 
pressed as autistic thinking, are really the 
fulfillment of our innermost wishes, wishes 
which are impossible of fulfillment in reality. 
There is thus a withdrawal from reality but 
with isolated points of contact in the nor- 
mally balanced individual. Life is a conflict 
between reality and retreat from it, particu- 
larly if the reality becomes unbearable. 

It would seem then, without stretching 

[135] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

the comparison too far, as if the dreams were 
the only realities, since in them are fulfilled 
our innermost desires and ambitions, and all 
our perplexities and conflicts are solved ac- 
cording to our heart's desire. This is the 
hypothesis of Freud . . . namely, that all 
mental activities correspond to two funda- 
mental principles . . . the "pleasure prin- 
ciple" and the 'reality principle." The 
"pleasure principle" is for the purpose cf 
seeking pleasure and avoiding pain and it is 
here that the concept of repression steps in. 
The "reality principle" is the concept of ad- 
justment to reality, either by contact with it 
or by withdrawing from it, and by reality we 
mean the mental as well as the physical 
world. 

All explorers, all those who with a scien- 
tific impetus follow what is called the spirit 
of adventure, are really those who retreat 
from reality by seeking new worlds. There 
is this exception however — they balance their 

[136] 



IN LITERATURE 

logical thinking with their autistic thinking, 
they keep their points of contact thus saving 
themselves from the fate of the neurotic or 
the stuporous patient. 

It is a question whether complete intro- 
version can ever lead to a favorable issue and 
liberate the enormous psychical energy which 
seems to be latent in the unconscious. In- 
troversion is always dangerous in the sense 
that the inner cravings of man possess a 
monstrous laziness and consequently any 
tendency to lose oneself in introversion may 
lead to indolence with its inability for the 
production of creative work. 



[137] 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SUBLIMATION OF REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

We are now prepared to discuss how re- 
pressions are removed, in other words, how 
does a neurosis get well? 

One of the greatest problems of psycho- 
analysis may be stated in a few words — 
namely, how does psychoanalysis work? It 
is generally admitted that it is not due to 
suggestion, since in all psychoanalytic treat- 
ment, in which careful attention is paid to. 
technique, the element of suggestion is care- 
fully avoided. Xeither can it be said to be 
due to explanation, for to explain the un- 
conscious source of the nervous illness or to 
enter into a discussion of the dreams, fre- 
quently produces a feeling of antagonism 
(resistance), which may well nigh prove in- 

[133] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

surmountable in the cure of a nervous ill- 
ess. 

It is easy to talk of the breaking down of 
resistance, of transference, of sublimation, of 
abreaction, 1 but these are the end-results of 
psychoanalysis rather than its inner mechan- 
ism and do not explain the real reason for the 
working of the psychoanalytic procedure. 
The test then of all psychoanalysis is the 
pragmatic one. 

It will be admitted by all psychoanalysts, 
that psychoanalysis, used in the sense con- 
ceived by Freud, is directed primarily to the 
unconscious, for dreams, symptomatic ac- 
tions, the wide range of the neuroses them- 
selves, have their origin in the unconscious. 
The so-called resistance is merely the force 
which prevents a deep penetration into the 

i By abreaction is meant the mental processes of work- 
ing off a pent-up emotion by living through it again in 
feeling and action. If completely abreacted, a repressed 
emotion is diffused and works itself off harmlessly, if not 
completely abreacted, it may lead to states of mental dis- 
sociation. 

[139] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

unconscious, which for certain purposes does 
not wish to be revealed. It defends itself 
against being brought into the light of con- 
scious thinking. 

Transference on the other hand represents 
the opposite of resistance, the ability to 
penetrate into the deeper strata of the un- 
conscious. Psychoanalysis then is the tech- 
nical instrument, if it may be so called, used 
for the purpose of penetrating or digging 
into the unconscious. If the term may be 
permitted every psychoanalyst is a paleo- 
psychologist, whose duty it is to penetrate 
into the historic past of the individual psyche, 
and to explore the primitive mentality. 

It has been generally admitted through 
study of dreams, and of the taboos and neu- 
roses of primitive men, that the unconscious, 
from which all neuroses take their origin, is 
archaic and barbaric, in fact, all neuroses are 
expressions of this barbaric unconscious. 
The presence of the (Edipus motive as an 

[140] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

expression of this archaic and unethical un- 
conscious is sufficient proof of the uncultural 
nature of the unconscious. The unconscious 
originated not only in the childhood of man, 
but because it contains so many repressed 
motives, may also be said to have originated 
in the childhood of the world. These re- 
pressed motives are revealed in dreams, as 
during sleep the censorship of social inhibi- 
tion is removed. There arise then dreams 
of revenge, the symbolic dream of flying and 
also the non-embarrassment dream of being 
insufficiently clothed. 

The dreams offer the best and it might be 
said, the incontrovertible evidence of these 
repressed feelings, which, since they cannot 
be fulfilled in reality, are fulfilled either in 
dreams or in neurotic disturbances. Thus 
a dream in every case, is merely a fulfilled 
repressed wish of the unconscious. As 
stated by Rank and Sachs: 1 "A searching 

i "The Significance of Psychoanalysis for the Mental 
Sciences." 

[141] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

investigation revealed sufficient grounds to 
justify the supposition that the collective 
primitive forms of mental life, as they exist 
in the child and remain preserved in the un- 
conscious of adults, are identical within cer- 
tain limits with the processes of the mental 
life of the savage, so far as these may hold 
as reflections of primitive humanity." 

In the unconscious is condensed and capit- 
ulated the cultural history of mankind. As 
the different strata of the earth have revealed 
to human paleontologists different cultural 
levels, so to the psychoanalyst, the study of 
dreams reveals the different cultural levels 
in the unconscious. Any description of the 
unconscious therefore must be expressed, 
not in the horizontal terms, but as being 
composed of different stratigraphic levels. 

All who have worked in psychoanalysis 
have been impressed with the fact that the 
motives or wishes of the unconscious are 
barbaric and unethical. The dream offers 

[142] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

us the best evidence of this barbarism, since 
the dream-formation takes place exclusively 
in the unconscious. The dream reveals verv 
primitive mental states, which for years have 
been more or less suppressed and dormant. 
Thus the unconscious contains the same de- 
sires which existed consciously in our very 
remote ancestors. The dream reveals the 
mind of prehistoric man, rather than the hu- 
man mind as it has been rationalized and 
changed through culture and education and 
through the evidence offered by the dream 
it is possible to reconstruct the entire human 
mind. 

If then the unconscious reveals very primi- 
tive and barbaric ways of thinking and if the 
only wishes at its disposal are more or less 
unethical and anti-social, several questions 
of great practical importance present them- 
selves. Can these unconscious motives be 
obliterated? Can they be raised to a higher 
cultural level? If these questions can be 

[143] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

answered in the affirmative, then we must 
look for such evidence in the dream, which 
is purely the product of the unconscious. 

It is now a matter of common observation 
that psychoanalysis can actually change the 
nature and motives of a subject's dreams. 1 
Psychoanalysis, therefore, does for the un- 
conscious of the individual what education 
does for the race. The best evidence of this 
cultural advancement in the unconscious can 
be demonstrated in dreams. 

That psychoanalysis is certainly effective 
in raising the primitive motives of the uncon- 
scious, can be shown by the following facts, 
taken from a psychoneurotic case which was 

i Attention was first called to this phenomenon, so valu- 
able for a clear understanding of the workings of psycho- 
analysis and its prognostic value, in a paper published by 
me in the New York Medical Journal for March 23, 1913. 
It was later further elaborated in my statistical study of 
psychoanalytic treatment and finally summarized in my 
paper on "Hermaphroditic Dreams" (Psychoanalytic Re- 
view — Oct. 1917), where it was stated that psychoanalysis 
can actually change the unconscious bi-sexual tendency of 
man, in the same way that it can raise our primitive un- 
conscious traits to a higher cultural level. 

[144] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

carefully studied, over a long period of time. 

A young man of high intelligence and with 
a cultured social background, at the begin- 
ning of the psychoanalysis, presented very 
primitive types of dreams, showing that his 
neurosis was the expression of barbaric re- 
pressed wishes. After some months of 
treatment, another dream of the same type 
occurred, in which a marked censorship was 
shown and an attempt to neutralize the fan- 
tasy, although at the beginning of the psy- 
choanalysis he knew intellectually about the 
censorship, but was unable to utilize it. 
This change as the result of psychoanalysis 
is interesting, for it demonstrates that the 
unconscious had been raised to a higher cul- 
tural level, where censorship became active 
and acted like a psychological taboo. 

The original feeling in this case proved 
that the patient's unconscious was the reposi- 
tory of exceedingly primitive emotions and 
wishes; emotions, antedating the taboo, be- 

[145] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

cause no psychological barrier had been de- 
veloped or erected. It is the unconscious 
that has changed rather than the censor; it 
has undergone a higher evolution as a result 
of psychoanalysis. 

This may be taken as the working of psy- 
choanalysis. A neurosis is the expression, 
usually symbolic, of the barbaric motives of 
the unconscious. Psychoanalysis has an 
educational influence in that the method 
raises the unconscious to a higher cultural 
level and sublimation. 

In this modification of the unconscious by 
psychoanalysis, the motives are so changed 
that they become really civilized, in fact a 
complete analysis is a complete regeneration. 

When a neurosis gets well spontaneously, 
without the aid of psychoanalysis, it is very 
doubtful if there is a complete recovery in 
the genuine psychological sense. By this 
is meant, that after a patient plunges into 
a neurosis, and the neurotic symptoms dis- 

[146] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

appear, either by the process of time or 
through the ordinary methods of reeduca- 
tion, the unconscious difficulties and conflicts 
which produced the neurosis, still remain, 
and are liable to reappear again through 
future upsetting factors. In the spontan- 
eous recovery of a neurosis (the term "re- 
covery" being used for want of a better 
word) , several processes may take place, viz. : 

1. If the neurosis was an escape from an 
unbearable situation, the symptoms gradu- 
ally simmer down or a conscious process of 
readjustment or compromise takes place. 

2. The neurosis in itself or its nucleus re- 
mains, but becomes "walled off" as it were, 
ready to break out at any future time under 
proper conditions of fatigue, worry, anxiety 
or emotional upheaval. 

3. There may develop a complete under- 
standing of the neurotic symptoms without 
the symptoms disappearing, in fact the neu- 
rosis remains, but is borne with a more phil- 

[147] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

osophical attitude. This is what usually 
takes place after methods of ordinary reedu- 
cation, the neurosis remains, but its symp- 
toms (fear or compulsive ideas) are looked 
upon from an entirely different angle. 

4. A spontaneous readjustment of the un- 
bearable situation which was responsible for 
the neurosis, may take place in the uncon- 
scious. In these cases there is either merely 
a rearrangement of the pathogenic material 
or it has been forced down to a lower level 
of the unconscious. It is extremely doubt- 
ful if this material has been completely ra- 
tionalized by the personality. 

As an example of this latter process, a 
woman whose son had gone to war was ex- 
tremely troubled by a recurrent dream in 
which her son's military uniform disappeared 
little by little. In this case, as the dream 
demonstrates, in spite of her conscious patri- 
otism there was an unconscious protest 
against war, because, as she stated it, the 

[148] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

war situation had shifted from an impersonal 
interest to a personal one "because it brings 
my son into the vortex and may swallow 
him up in it." The unconscious symbolized 
this process in the dream by making the mili- 
tary uniform gradually disappear. An in- 
teresting case is reported by Rivers 1 which 
shows in a very clear manner how spontan- 
eous readjustments may take place in the 
unconscious. An officer who had been par- 
tially buried by an explosion and apparently 
uninjured, immediately collapsed when he 
saw the remains of a fellow officer who had 
been blown to pieces. This vision haunted 
him in dreams to the extent that he would 
awaken in the utmost terror. Finally he 
became afraid to go to sleep. Under the 
effect of psychotherapeutic conversation, the 
character of the dreams changed. At first 
he saw the mangled body but without horror, 
then in a dream he took some of his friend's 

iW. H. R. Rivers — "The Repression of War Experi- 
ence" — Lancet, 1918. 

[149] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

personal belongings to send to his relatives 
and finally he dreamed that he was talking 
with his friend. Then the insomnia disap- 
peared. In this case a spontaneous read- 
justment of the nature of a wish fulfillment 
took place in the unconscious. 

In none of these methods of "spontaneous 
recovery," is there a genuine recovery; the 
conflict which lay at the root of the neurosis 
has not been eliminated, only "walled off," 
readjusted or resymbolized. Psychoanaly- 
sis alone can cure a neurosis, for it actually 
eliminates the unconscious conflicts which 
lie at the basis of the neurosis, either by 
raising the barbaric wishes to a higher cul- 
tural level, by bringing the patient into 
touch with reality again, from which reality 
all neurotics withdraw, or by teaching the 
patient to utilize the energy of the neurotic 
conflict for more practical purposes. Psy- 
choanalysis is like an archaeological excava- 
tion, it digs out the buried complexes and 

[150] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

then they disintegrate. Through the draw- 
ing-out of these repressed motives and im- 
pulses into the full light of consciousness, 
through facing and understanding the neu- 
rotic difficulties, lies the ethical value of psy- 
choanalysis. 

It is an erroneous idea that psychoanalysis 
consists entirely of sexuality in its narrower 
sense or that it is the searching after porno- 
graphic thoughts in the patient, as some of 
its myopic critics would lead us to believe. 
A properly conducted psychoanalysis refers 
less to sex in its literal sense, than does the 
details of a medical history in a physical dis- 
order. On the contrary, it is the broad, sex- 
ual conceptions of psychoanalysis, embrac- 
ing all human emotions, conflicts and desires, 
which gives psychoanalysis its high ethical 
value. Psychoanalysis teaches how to meet 
these problems, without flying from them on 
one hand in repression, or by embracing and 
treasuring them in unhealthy fantasies. A 

[151] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

successful psychoanalysis should leave the 
patient completely sublimated, that is, it 
should enable him to utilize the unconscious 
energy for the higher purposes of life, it 
should teach not to waste this energy in 
fighting the neurosis. 

In order to demonstrate the beneficial re- 
sults of psychoanalysis, I can cite the case of 
a young man, who several years ago under- 
went a psychoanalysis for a neurosis of ex- 
treme severity. As a result of treatment 
the neurotic symptoms entirely disappeared. 
At the beginning of the Great War, he en- 
listed, and at the time, I felt so sure of the 
beneficial results of psychoanalysis, in pro- 
viding a thorough reeducation and adjust- 
ment of the patient's unconscious, that I was 
able to predict that it was practically im- 
possible for him to develop a war neurosis. 
This for the reason that experience has 
shown that this was one of the types of per- 
sonality which was particularly prone to de- 

[152] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

velop the neurosis popularly known as 
"shell shock." This prediction was subse- 
quently verified, for he went through the 
war and was engaged in some of the most 
severe battles, exposed to the usual fatigue 
and anxieties of military life, without the 
slightest neurotic symptoms developing. 

In the unconscious, however, one inter- 
esting symptom developed and I feel sure 
that it was the psychoanalysis alone which 
prevented the symptom from projecting it- 
self into the conscious mental life and thus 
producing a war neurosis. It is well known 
that a large majority of war neuroses, such 
as the cases of functional tremor, paralysis 
or blindness, are merely unconscious methods 
of escape from an unbearable situation. 
The patient had a dream that he was blind, 
but in the dream there was a complete under- 
standing and correction of what the blind- 
ness meant, namely, — a relief from military 
necessity. The fact that this remained a 

[153] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

dream, that the unconscious wish was im- 
mediately understood, prevented this uncon- 
scious wish from converting itself into the 
symptom of hysterical blindness, after the 
manner of the mechanism of the conversion 
hysterias. The unconscious had been so 
well educated by the previous psychoanalysis, 
that it no longer took the infantile satisfac- 
tion of making the subject escape from 
what he consciously felt was his patriotic 
duty. 

At the Fifth International Congress for 
Psychoanalysis held in 1918, the main theme 
for discussion was the treatment and psycho- 
analysis of the War neuroses, popularly 
known as "shell shock." It was generally 
concurred that the war neuroses were merely 
manifestations of the mechanisms of the re- 
actions to fright, the same as the "fear neu- 
roses" in the times of peace. The neuroses 
were classified as anxiety hysteria and re- 
pressed hysteria, and like all neuroses were 

[154] 






SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

merely methods of escape from an unbear- 
able situation, chosen unconsciously. As in 
all neuroses, the repression had failed to 
solve the unconscious conflict and conse- 
quently the subject could escape his diffi- 
culties only by a flight into disease. 

The chief criticism which has been directed 
towards the psychoanalytic treatment of the 
neuroses has been that there are no statistics 
available showing the results of the method, 
the same as is the case in other departments 
of clinical medicine. It appears that this 
skeptical attitude was justified and it was 
with the purpose of disarming or minimizing 
such criticism, that a statistical study was 
undertaken. 1 

Some of the cases were severe, others mild, 
but in a large majority of these, other 

i See my paper "Some Statistical Results of the Psycho- 
analytic Treatment of the Psychoneuroses" — Psychoanalytic 
Review — April, 1917. Since this paper was published, the 
psychoanalytic treatment has been carried into fields 
hitherto thought inaccessible and has greatly widened the 
therapeutic application of psychoanalysis. 

[155] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

methods of treatment, such as drugs, rest, 
electricity, explanation, reeducation, per- 
suasion and the various ordinary methods of 
psychotherapy, had been tried in vain. 
These later methods deal only with conscious 
processes and interests, whereas the success 
of psychoanalysis is dependent on the fact 
that it deals with unconscious mental factors, 
which form the basis of every neurosis. In 
certain of the cases treated by psychoanaly- 
sis, it seems justifiable to state, considering 
the inefficiency of other psychotherapeutic 
methods, that the neurosis would have gone 
on indefinitely, thus leaving the patient in a 
condition of life-long misery and incapacity, 
had not psychoanalysis been utilized. 

In the sexual neuroses, such as homoero- 
tism, psychoanalysis was the only method 
which offered any hope of cure or even 
amelioration of the condition. Before the 
days of psychoanalysis, hypnosis was utilized 
in an attempt to cure these conditions, but 

[156] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

the results were indifferent and any improve- 
ment that was obtained was temporary. 
Failures with hypnosis in the light of our 
present knowledge of homoerotism, were to 
be expected, since hypnotic suggestion, in- 
stead of breaking down the resistances which 
were responsible for the homoerotic attitude, 
tended to increase them. 1 

In a large number of cases, psychoanalysis 
was used as a last resort. This statement is 
made for the purpose of minimizing the 
usual criticism that the case would have re- 
covered without psychoanalysis, but the fact 
that certain cases were absolutely unaffected 
by other therapeutic procedures but recov- 
ered under psychoanalysis, is sufficient to 
invalidate any such attitude. Psychoanaly- 
sis is a rational therapeutic procedure re- 
quiring a specially elaborated technique and 

i For a sound discussion of why hypnosis fails in these 
cases, all the more interesting because it was written in pre- 
psychoanalytic days and yet psychoanalytically sound, see 
Chapter IV of Otto Weininger's "Sex and Character." 

[157] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

is based upon sound modern psychodynamic 
interpretations of the mental mechanism of 
the neuroses. 

The cases to which psychoanalysis is par- 
ticularly applicable, consist principally of 
the severe hysterias (such as anxiety hys- 
teria, conversion hysteria and dissociation 
hysteria) the compulsion neuroses, mental 
torticollis, retarded depressions, the sexual 
neuroses (various types of sexual inver- 
sion) , stammering, the anxiety neuroses, and 
finally certain psychoses such as paranoiac 
states with limited delusion formation, mani- 
ac-depressive insanity and dementia prsecox. 
It appears that the early or mild cases of de- 
mentia prsecox are distinctly amenable to 
psychoanalysis, as at this stage the contents 
of the psychosis are readily accessible and 
furthermore in the early development of the 
disease, the mental mechanism is strongly al- 
lied to hysteria. 1 

i Isadore H. Corlat — "The Treatment of Dementia Prae- 

[158] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

Of course, recovery from a neurosis de- 
pends upon the transference and the ability 
of the analysis to break down the uncon- 
scious resistances which prolong the neu- 
rosis. Those cases which do not progress 
to recovery and in which only an ameliora- 
tion can be obtained, the retardation is due 
to the unconscious resistance, that is, a desire 
on the part of the patient to retain the neu- 
rosis, as the neurosis acts as a protector or 
as a withdrawal or escape from an unbear- 
able reality. The successful progress of a 
case is best determined by the gradual dis- 
appearance of the neurotic symptoms or a 
change in the character of the dreams, as the 
sources of both the dreams and the neurosis 
is in the unconscious. The dreams, to the 
trained psychoanalyst, offer the best objec- 
tive evidence of either the progress or the 
retardation of the case. From the dream 

cox by Psychoanalysis — Journal Abnormal Psychology — 
Dec:, 1917. 

[159] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

can be determined the transferences and the 
patient's attitude toward the neurosis. 

Certain well selected cases of dementia 
prsecox should be given the benefit of a 
psychoanalysis and if the analysis is suc- 
cessful, the social reaction of the patient 
improves. When we consider the tendency 
of dementia prsecox to deterioration, it is 
worth while to attempt treatment at the 
psychological level, even if this merely 
ameliorates the condition. Of course, these 
1 attempts are based upon the theory, which 
is now gaining credence among all psychia- 
trists, that dementia prsecox is a psycho- 
genetic and not an organic disorder. In de- 
mentia prsecox, psychoanalysis furnishes in- 
formation which it is essential to have, in 
order to deal with the patient intelligently 
and advise accordingly. It illuminates the 
factors which made or preceded the break- 
ing down and penetrates into the nature of 
the complexes, and thus, instead of approach- 

[160] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

ing the problem blindly, furnishes material 
for the intelligent handling of the patient. 
Psychoanalysis will orient the physician in 
the handling of the patient's social relations, 
which is of the highest importance in de- 
mentia prsecox, as all of these patients tend 
to be shut-in and anti-social. 

The best results of psychoanalysis are ob- 
tained in hysteria and the sexual neuroses. 
In stammering, too, the results are gratify- 
ing and permanent, as stammering is a form 
of anxiety neurosis and is frequently as- 
sociated with other neurotic symptoms. 
Speech training in stammering is useless ; in 
fact, it may make a stammerer worse. In 
stammering, the speech defect breaks out 
after the individual has learned to talk, 
usually after an emotional episode or during 
a critical period of development. The 
speech defect in stammering is not the dis- 
ease, but merely a symptom of the under- 
lying neurotic anxiety. 

[161] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

The periodic depressions should also be 
psychoanalyzed, not during the period of 
depression, but in the period of remission, 
in an attempt to eliminate the factors which 
might precipitate further attacks. Recur- 
rences in after life can be avoided. In men- 
tal torticollis the effects of psychoanalysis in 
clearing up the muscular spasm have been 
most gratifying, particularly in those c:. 
where the usual orthopedic methods have 
failed. These cases present tremendous 
difficulties of treatment, because the roots 
of the neurosis are so deeply seated. 

In the paranoiac states, the analysis should 
proceed along the line of both the conscious 
and the unconscious settings of the delusion 
formation, that is, an uncovering of the act- 
ual circumstances in the patient's career 
which lead to the delusional misinterpreta- 
tions. This material should be used for re- 
adjustment. In epilepsy, a study of the at- 
tack, and its precipitating factors in connec- 

[162] 



SUBLIMATION OF EMOTIONS 

tion with an analysis of the mental make-up 
of the individual has furnished methods of 
psychoanalytic approach which in the future 
may be found very beneficial of results. 

In psychoanalysis we have a procedure 
which is based upon sound conceptions and 
it consequently must remain as the most 
effective psychotherapeutic method known 
to medicine. The method is particularly ap- 
plicable to those psychoneuroses which have 
failed to improve under any other proce- 
dure and it is the only method which pene- 
trates to the fundamental disturbance and so 
effects a radical cure. Other psychothera- 
peutic methods merely teach or train the in- 
dividual to evade his difficulty. Psychoan- 
alysis penetrates to the basis of the disturb- 
ance by uncovering the actual unconscious 
source of the neurosis. 



[163] 



CHAPTER V 

THE DEVELOPMENT OF PSYCHOANALYSIS 

Without attempting a prophecy in the 
literal sense, it seems worth while, in the 
present stage of advancement of psychoan- 
alysis, to briefly review its contemporary ac- 
tivities and attempt to ascertain what the 
future offers for its various medical and 
'cultural aspects. As a therapeutic proce- 
dure, psychoanalysis is not only compara- 
tively new but really epoch making in the 
help it furnishes to nervous sufferers. As 
such, in certain well-selected cases of neu- 
roses and psychoneuroses, it is immeasurably 
superior to the so-called rest cure, a proce- 
dure whose effects in neurological therapeu- 
tics have been most pernicious. 

Physicians are beginning to recognize the 

[164] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

efficacy of psychoanalysis and while only a 
few have mastered the technique, yet increas- 
ing numbers of cases are referred to those 
who have specialized in the subject in order 
that the nervous sufferer may be given the 
benefit of a really fundamental type of treat- 
ment. It seems to be becoming more and 
more evident to the profession that the tech- 
nique of psychoanalysis is something which 
must be learned and mastered through ex- 
perience, in the same way that the technique 
of surgery must be learned. 

The technical methods of psychoanalysis, 
as in all fields of exact science, are under- 
going modifications and improvements in 
the hands of physicians working in this field. 

A great deal of the future of psychoanaly- 
sis depends upon improvement in its tech- 
nique. The results of the method can best 
be ascertained, not so much by study of in- 
dividual cases, as by careful statistics of the 
effect of the method by different workers. 

[165] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

An attempt at a statistical study based upon 
the results of nearly one hundred psycho- 
analyses has already been made. 1 The re- 
lation of psychoanalysis to ethics and the ef- 
fect of psychoanalytic conceptions and the 
theories of repression and the unconscious 
can be easily seen in some recent philosoph- 
ical publications. In fact, the idea that in- 
trospection alone is able to reveal all the 
facts of consciousness, as maintained by some 
academic and experimental psychologists, is 
being relegated to the limbo of outworn 
ideas, in the light of our present knowledge 
of unconscious thinking. We are learning, 
too, that the spontaneous sublimation of a 
patient should be encouraged and no effort 
should be made to minimize and thwart it. 
In fact, as a type of emotional sublimation, 
religion, using the term in its broadest sense 
without reference to any particular dogma, 

i Isador H. Coriat, "Some Statistical Results of the 
Psychoanalytic Treatment." — Psychoanalytic Review, April, 
1917. 

[166] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

offers one of the most effective and satis- 
factory routes for the sublimating process. 

Pfister * makes the following statement 
concerning the value of sublimation in re- 
ligion. 

"Psychoanalysis also teaches us to esti- 
mate the value of religion anew. I confess 
that the beauty and the blessing of a healthy, 
ethically pure piety have only become over- 
whelmingly clear to me from the investiga- 
tions here described. Religion, in favorable 
cases, guards the libido repelled by the rude, 
avaricious reality, against conversion into 
hysterical physical symptoms and against 
introversion into anxiety, melancholia, ob- 
sessional phenomena, etc. 

"Freud speaks of the extraordinary in- 
crease in neuroses since the decline of re- 
ligion ! I would much rather have unfortu- 
nate people whom I cannot really cure by 
analysis, in an extreme sect or a cloister than 

i Pfister, "The Psychoanalytic Method"— 1917. 

[167] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

in a neurosis. Of course there is also much 
neurotic misery in cloisters and religious 
communities." 

As as example of this sublimation in re- 
ligion, the following case can be cited, partly 
because of the patient's intelligent apprecia- 
tion of the psychoanalytic process and partly 
because it furnishes an insight into exactly 
how psychoanalysis works. 

The following was written by an intelli- 
gent woman, a sufferer from a severe com- 
pulsion neurosis of a year's duration. Al- 
though her father was a clergyman and a 
college professor and she was thus brought 
up in her childhood in a religious atmo- 
sphere, yet the severe compulsions which 
concerned the excreta of the body and made 
themselves manifest by obscene thoughts, 
acted as a barrier to her religion, since she 
felt that her neurosis was a moral fault or a 
moral contamination. Her recent dreams 
had shown an unconscious tendency to sub- 

[168] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

limate through religion and this form of 
sublimation was encouraged. At the begin- 
ning of the analysis, the resistances were 
strong, but these resistances were gradually 
overcome and transferences became marked. 

In a recent dream she seemed to be going 
through the aisles of a magnificent cathedral 
to a door, when she found a clergyman of 
her acquaintance (an old lover who married 
some one else, much to her disappointment, 
and consequently she never married) sitting 
at his study table. In her dream, there was 
an emotion of deep faith. This dream 
demonstrated not only the wish to sublimate 
in religion, but likewise a transference to her 
physician (who was really the "clergyman 
in his study"). 

In this dream we see at work a prepara- 
tory arranging function which belongs to the 
work of adjustment in the unconscious, a 
sort of an autosymbolic presentation of 
the present psychological situation. The ac- 

[169] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

count of the patient's sublimation in religion 
follows in her own words. 

'We can know God only in our fellows, 
and we can know our fellows only in God.' 
This was the teaching put into words by one 
who knew him well of a Christian minister, 
a man of insight. Now as I begin to ex- 
perience the healing power of psychoanaly- 
sis, their truth comes to me in full measure, 
brought out and illuminated by the process. 
For the relation between physician and pa- 
tient seem to have much in common with 
1 God's dealings with man. 

"Thus if the doctor is to help his patient, 
it is of the first importance that the latter 
shall trust him and turn to him in entire 
confidence. Accordingly from the begin- 
ning of the analysis the physician strives to 
inculcate this confidence, and to make the 
patient feel that he is his friend. Little by 
little the patient's resistance is broken down 
by this attracting force until at length he 

[170] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

yields without reserve. Is not this human 
power akin to the constraining power of the 
divine love? 

"Again, especially in the early stages of 
the analysis, it almost seems as if the patient 
were left to his own devices. The physician 
apparently follows his lead. The patient 
must think and speak what is in his own 
mind until with some degree of definiteness 
he realizes his own need. Not until then, 
when the patient is ready to receive it, does 
the doctor give the helpful suggestion the 
consoling thought. Surely this is God's way 
of dealing with the world. The great dis- 
covery is made only when necessity has 
driven men to search for it. 

"Best of all is the way in which the experi- 
ence of psychoanalysis contributes toward a 
living faith. It brings home to us the deep 
need of the human soul for a friendship out- 
side itself. The nervous invalid turns to his 
physician almost as a child turns to his 

[171] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

mother, trusting that somehow he is going to 
be helped. He learns that 'confession is 
good for the soul.' that the burden is light- 
ened bv sharing it with a friend. At first it 
is hard to reveal his own weakness to another, 
but as he goes on he finds that he is always 
able to take the next step. He realizes that 
the attitude of his hearer is not condemna- 
tion, but sympathy, and that with the true 
physician the depth of this sympathy is 
measured only by his patient's needs. 

"Presently, however, as the analysis pro- 
ceeds, the patient is brought to realize that 
this dependence on the doctor is a means, not 
an end : also that the moral obligation to lay 
bare his inmost soul to a fellowman exists 
only in his own imagination. He knows 
now that it is the part of the full grown 
man or woman to bear his own burden, 
that in relation to his fellows each hu- 
man being stands alone. It is only God 

[172] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

who can meet man's deepest need, the expe- 
rience of psychoanalysis has revitalized this 
familiar thought. And this is the thought 
that makes us free. 

"The patient knows that he is free, and 
he feels as if he had reached this conclusion 
by himself. Yet when he reviews the prog- 
ress of the analysis, and takes again in retro- 
spect each successive step, he realizes that 
the path has opened for him to walk in, that 
his physician has led the way. He has been 
thinking the doctor's thoughts after him. 
Those words of the great poet come to his 
mind — 'There is a power that shapes our 
ends, rough-hew them though we may.' 
He knows that in the psychoanalysis of life, 
this experience is a stage through which he 
has been led by the great analyzer of our 
souls. 

"Through his fellow men he has come to 
know God. 

[173] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

"Thus we learn that science is the comple- 
ment of religion, that psychology no less 
than theology leads us to God." 

Psychoanalysis can do much too, in form- 
ulating on the basis of its principles, rational 
rules for nervous and mental hygiene, rather 
than the usual loose conceptions of will 
power, etc. In fact it points that the real 
prevention and mastery of neuroses must 
come from within, from the individual analy- 
sis, rather than through any general propa- 
ganda along the lines of mental hygiene, 
since the latter at its best can only indicate 
collective rules which cannot be adapted to 
the complexities of individual minds. 

As the psychoanalytic technique becomes 
perfected, we may expect better and better 
results through the treatment of such con- 
ditions which were formerly looked upon as 
hopeless, such as well selected cases of de- 
mentia praecox or mild paranoiac states. 
Certainly, the treatment of sexual inversion 

[174] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

is far more hopeful with psychoanalysis than 
with the older methods of suggestion and 
hypnosis. 

When psychoanalytic principles become 
known to educators they may do much to 
prevent the development of a neurosis dur- 
ing the critical formative period of a child's 
life. That tendency to petty stealing or 
even fantastic lying may often be the begin- 
ning of an hysterical or a compulsion neu- 
rosis ; it is very necessary for the educator to 
know, in order to refer the child to the 
proper source, where the faults may be sci- 
entifically corrected rather than thought- 
lessly punished. It is to be hoped that the 
future studies of juvenile delinquency and 
juvenile faults will be strongly influenced by 
psychoanalytic conceptions, that is, one must 
look for deeper motives than even the most 
painstaking anamnesis affords. In cases 
showing compulsive tendencies to stealing, 
the so-called kleptomania, it is useless to ask 

[175] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

a child why he takes certain things, since the 
real motive is unknown to him, whereas a 
short psychoanalysis may often clear up the 
situation and furnish valuable therapeutic 
hints. 

For instance, in the psychoanalysis of the 
case of a boy who was in the habit of pilfer- 
ing money at home and spending it on nor- 
mal childish desires, the manifestation re- 
vealed a strong (Edipus complex and, in 
addition, it demonstrated that the boy took 
the money from his mother, never from his 
father, as he knew that this act would remain 
unpunished by his mother on account of the 
strong attachment she had for him. The 
obvious therapy was to break up the (Edi- 
pus complex so that the boy would have as 
much fear of stealing from his mother as 
from his father. This was successfully ac- 
complished. 

Clergymen, too, have found a knowledge 
of the principles of the psychoanalysis of 

[176] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

great value in their religious and moral ad- 
vise to those who apply to them for consola- 
tion in life's battles and struggles. 

Adler's approach to psychoanalysis from 
the organic side, interpreting organic inferi- 
ority as the basic mechanism of what Freud 
terms the conflict, is of great value for the 
future development of psychoanalysis, par- 
ticularly in harmonizing the viewpoints of 
these who are either inclined to functional 
or to physical interpretations of the develop- 
ment of the neurosis. 

As the unconscious is the historical past 
of the individual and consists therefore 
mainly of repressed material, so from the un- 
conscious the springs of character take their 
source. The character traits of the individ- 
ual are not inherited, neither are they the 
results of conscious effort. The charac- 
ter of a person is made up of original re- 
pressed childhood impulses or sublimations 
of these. All character formation has an 

[177] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

emotional rather than an intellectual basis. 

To a certain extent one of the future tasks 
of psychoanalysis, will not only be the treat- 
ment of the abnormal manifestations of the 
neuroses, but in addition, certain detrimental 
character traits in normal individuals might 
be immeasurably benefited. The object of 
psychoanalysis in all these conditions is to 
bring the unconscious repressions into con- 
sciousness and by means of this, the conflict, 
which produced the defect, may be brought 
to a satisfactory conclusion. 

As an example of what may be accom- 
plished in the psychoanalysis of a character 
trait, which was detrimental to the individ- 
ual, the following case may be cited. A 
young man complained of the habit of pro- 
crastination which had been slowly develop- 
ing for years and more recently had pro- 
gressed to such an extent that it interfered 
with his work. A short analysis of the situ-, 
ation disclosed the fact that the roots of the 

[178] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

procrastination arose in his early childhood. 
He was more attached to his father than his 
mother and it was under the former's influ- 
ence that the habit of procrastination arose. 
The origin of this was unknown to him un- 
til it was revealed by a psychoanalysis, but it 
could be determined that it was produced as 
conflict and was really a projection into his 
adult life of his childhood as influenced by 
the image of his father. Finally during the 
course of the analysis he had a dream in 
which it appeared that his father was dead 
and the undertaker had been sent for. This 
dream was interesting and important, as his 
father was still alive. The dream symbol- 
ized the death, not of his father, but what his 
father stood for, namely, his procrastination. 
In other words it symbolized the death or 
disappearance of his procrastination in the 
same childhood manner that the unconscious 
always symbolizes the death of a member of 
the family. After this dream had been an- 

[179] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

alyzed and explained, the subject became en- 
tirely well. 

In the unconscious is concealed emotional 
energy which is of great importance in the 
sublimation of the complexities of life. 
This is the sublimation which represents the 
spiritual and ethical and artistic striving of 
man towards greater inner perfection and to 
a more perfect adjustment with the world of 
reality. Psychoanalysis teaches the individ- 
ual how to make use of this energy for a 
social purpose and not waste it in mere de- 
fense of repressions and in unhealthy erotic 
fantasies. Thus the future of psychoanaly- 
sis will be a highly moral task of great edu- 
cational value, it will teach the individual 
and through the individual the race, that the 
Utopia comes from within and as this inner 
adjustment to reality is perfected, mankind 
will advance to higher ideas of social and 
ethical justice. For then no longer will we 
resist according to our narrow prejudices 

[180] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

and traditions or by flying into the realm of 
phantasmal comfort, but will react as beings 
who are freed from infantile limitations and 
of childhood reactions to adult situations. 

Thus Freud has given the w T orld a new in- 
strument for explaining the unconscious 
mental life in both the individual and in 
society. The methods elaborated are of the 
highest value, since the motives of all men 
and women, the healthy as well as the nerv- 
ously ill, are determined by unconscious 
thoughts of which they are unaware. Men 
do not act from conscious motives, but from 
unconscious ideas, of which the conscious mo- 
tives are mere rationalizations or excuses. 
This is the fundamental principle of that 
new psychology elaborated by Freud, which 
to-day and in the future, will explain more 
and more the real forces at the basis of hu- 
man conduct and human motives. 

Psychoanalysis is beginning to found a 
new ethics as well as a new psychology, a new 

[181] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

neurology and a new school of literary criti- 
cism. It bears the same relation in all its 
principles to the human mind, and to the 
social consciousness as biology does to the 
organic world. In other words, through 
psychoanalysis, the mind is dissected and the 
hidden motives and sources of human con- 
duct laid bare. 

For psychoanalysis has shown us our true 
selves, how selfish and barbaric and revenge- 
ful we all are, but repressing these primitive 
instincts into our unconscious where they 
only appear in dreams or in the form of a 
nervous malady. Deeper than any philos- 
ophy, for most philosophical systems repre- 
sent merely individual attitudes toward the 
universe, is the psychoanalytic conception of 
the unconscious, because it deals with the 
mind of all mankind and with all the aspects 
of human life. However different men may 
be in their religious or social or political be- 
liefs, there is "one mind common to all indi- 

[182] 



PSYCHOANALYSIS 

vidual men" to use the phrase of Emerson, 
and this universal mind is the unconscious. 
At bottom, the psychology of all men re- 
mains the same, however different their cul- 
ture and social consciousness may be. This 
fundamental identity of the human race is in 
the unconscious. It is the field of the un- 
conscious which Freud has made peculiarly 
his own, in its analysis for the hidden mean- 
ings of human life. 



[188] 



CHAPTER VI 

THE DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

The practice of psychoanalysis has dem- 
onstrated that after one mass of repressed 
material has been brought to light, there are 
frequently opened up new levels of this re- 
pressed material, all of which demand an in- 
vestigation. Therefore both from the prac- 
tical and theoretical standpoint, at least for 
the purpose of definite description, the un- 
conscious must be conceived, not as a hori- 
zontal plane, but possessing a stratigraphic 
structure. 

During a psychoanalysis, the conscious 
material is first investigated, then one 
reaches the level of the foreconscious, where 
the minimum of resistance and repression 
has taken place. As the analytic excavation 

[184] 



DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

proceeds, we reach the region of the uncon- 
scious, where lower and lower levels are en- 
countered until we come to the oldest por- 
tions of the human psyche, most necessary 
for the preservation of the race, that is, the 
level of sexual and nutritional craving. 
The greatest resistance is found at these low- 
est levels, for the human mind is constantly 
on the defensive lest it betray the indelible 
stamp of its lowly origin. 

Anthropological research offers the best 
analogy and terminology for this concep- 
tion. The unconscious is thus understood 
as being composed of mental deposits from 
the past, superimposed on each other and 
showing the development of the psyche from 
the very beginnings of the human race. 
The study of these unconscious mental de- 
posits has been aptly termed paleopsychol- 
ogy by Jelliffe. This is a useful, and schem- 
atic and at the same time a pragmatic con- 
ception of the unconscious. 

[185] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

This concept traces the development of 
the individual psyche from the standpoint of 
the part played by repression in the produc- 
tion of the various levels of the unconscious. 
It is the science dealing with the fossilized 
thought forms in the unconscious of man 
and is analogous to paleopathology, the sci- 
ence of diseases which can be demonstrated 
in human and animal remains of ancient 
times, such as of the ancient Egyptians or of 
prehistoric man and fossil animals. 1 

According to Jelliffe — "The historical 
past of the psyche is in the region of the un- 
conscious, and this region can only be recon- 
structed by an analysis, an uncovering of its 
contents, much as the history of the earth's 
crust can only be known through excavation 
and discovery of fossil remains in the strata. 
The uncovering of the contents of the past in 
the unconscious, may by analogy be termed 

i See "Studies in Paleopathology" by R. L. Moodie — 
Annals of Medical History, Vol. I, Nov. 4, 1917. 

[186] 



DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

paleopsychology." Every psychoanalyst 
therefore is a paleopsychologist, and the 
dreams reveal the different cultural levels of 
the unconscious. 

These fossilized thought forms of man- 
kind are preserved in the different levels of 
the unconscious, in the same way that ana- 
tomical fossil forms are preserved in the dif- 
ferent strata of the earth. The unconscious 
can, in the hands of a skilled psychoanalyst, 
be reconstructed from a few dream frag- 
ments, in somewhat the same way that a 
skilled anthropologist can reconstruct a par- 
ticular type of prehistoric man from a few 
fragments of his skull. Like the anthro- 
pologist, too, the psychoanalyst by means of 
the dream material, and of dreams showing 
particular symbolisms, can fairly accurately 
orient the stratigraphic level of this dream 
in the unconscious. For the unconscious is 
composed, not of one mass of repressions, 
but of superimposed repressions accumu- 

[187] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

lated layer by layer, as mankind advanced 
in his cultural development from prehistoric 
times to the modern period. The uncon- 
scious mental life was born when repression 
began. Without repression there would be 
no unconscious. 

As anthropologists have gone backwards 
in time to investigate the anatomical struc- 
ture and culture of prehistoric man, as the 
geological history of the earth has been ex- 
amined layer by layer, so must the entire 
mental history of man be pushed further and 
further back into the remote past. The best 
evidence of this successive growth of man's 
mental history is found in the unconscious 
and not the conscious, as the latter is only 
the recent mental crust of the cultural his- 
tory of mankind. 

To understand the complete human mind 
we must dig, by means of the technical meth- 
ods of psychoanalysis, through the various 
levels of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis 

[188] 



DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

is the instrument that delves into the hidden 
depths of the individual psyche. It does 
not interpret surface motives, because the 
real motives are attached to the primitive 
emotions of the unconscious mental life. As 
we advance into adult life, the unconscious 
becomes deeper and deeper, has more and 
more levels, although in the child, where the 
unconscious is quite shallow, it already con- 
tains archaic and primitive wishes which are 
fulfilled with very little resistance and prac- 
tically no censorship. The infantile or child 
mind does produce manifestations in adult 
life, but it appears in a less primitive form. 
The child is slumbering in the unconscious of 
every adult, but is ready to awaken at any 
time, ready to become restless and anxious 
and when it does awaken, then dreams or 
various neurotic manifestations develop. 
In the adult the infantile mind is deeply 
buried in the depth of the unconscious. 
According to Freud, from the beginning 

[189] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

of life there already exist two separate sys- 
tems of mental activity which are precursors 
or forerunners of what later becomes con- 
scious and unconscious thinking. He states 
"The wish manifested in the dream must be 
an infantile one. In the adult, it originates 
in the unconscious, while in the child, where 
no separation or censor as yet exists be- 
tween the foreconscious and unconscious, or 
where these are only in process of formation, 
it is our unfulfilled and unrepressed wish 
from the waking state." For instance, the 
neurotic fears of contamination or of pointed 
objects, as they appear in the compulsion 
neuroses, are really taboo commands from 
the primitive layers of the unconscious. 
The most primitive dreams are the fossilized 
thoughts or structures of our unconscious, 
deepest and farthest removed from modern 
civilization. 

The unconscious, therefore, is the key to 
the human mind and in it can be found all 

[190] 



DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

the mental traits of prehistoric man. The 
unconscious is primitive as it is composed en- 
tirely of repressed material. These mental 
traits have disappeared from consciousness 
and have become precipitated into the un- 
conscious, because of the ever-active power of 
repression in the history of the development 
of civilization. The conscious life of man 
has taken centuries for culture, the uncon- 
scious is still older and regresses to the times 
of our remotest ancestors. In fact, the un- 
conscious is the oldest portion of the human 
mind. 

In mental and nervous diseases one often 
sees outcropping symptoms, symptomatic 
behavior, dreams, bits of thinking which are 
found only in very primitive human types 
which come from the deepest strata of the 
unconscious mental life. They regress to 
this primitive behavior and mode of thinking 
because they have the material for such 
thought and behavior repressed into the low- 

[191] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

est levels of the unconscious. This for the 
reason, that so far as the unconscious is con- 
cerned, time does not exist, because in an in- 
stant a dream may go back to the social and 
mental life of our prehistoric ancestors. 
Therefore our social cravings often drag 
phantastic symptoms or dream symbols from 
the lowest depths of the unconscious. "The 
man of prehistoric times lives on, unchanged, 
in our unconscious" (Freud) . 

Before the development of psychoanaly- 
sis, Neitzsche recognized the primitive na- 
ture of the unconscious as reflected in 
dreams. He writes, "In sleep and in dreams 
one passes through the entire curriculum of 
primitive mankind. Even as to-day we 
think in dreams, mankind thought in waking 
life through many thousand years. In 
dreams this piece of ancient humanity works 
in us. The dream takes us back to remote 
conditions of human culture and puts in our 
hands the means of understanding it better." 

[192] 



DEPTH OF THE UNCONSCIOUS 

If the mind were not plastic, if it were 
merely like the fossilized skeletal remains of 
animals found imbedded in stone and gravel, 
evolution would have been impossible. But 
from age to age the plastic human mind has 
been changing and in its integrations, it has 
become possible for it to organize the highly 
complicated modern civilization. As Berg- 
son states: "Everywhere but in man, con- 
sciousness has come to a stand ; in man alone 
it has kept on its way." 

This is because mind is plastic, because it 
pushes its primal and archaic wishes to lower 
and lower levels in the unconscious. Conse- 
quently man can better utilize his conscious 
energy to drive forward to more complex in- 
tegrations and to those higher expressions of 
the repressed, primitive energy which is 
sublimated into social, ethical and spiritual 
reconstruction. In the words of Tennyson: 

"Men may rise on stepping stones 
Of their dead selves to higher things." 

[193] 



CHAPTER VII 

A FAIRY TALE FROM THE UNCONSCIOUS 

It has been shown, that the psychology 
of fairy tales, as interpreted by psycho- 
analysis from the standpoint of origin and 
symbolism, bears a close and intimate rela- 
tionship to the world of dreams. Not only 
are fairy tales highly symbolized products 
and like dreams, do not say on the surface 
what they really mean, but like dreams also, 
their origin is in the very depths of the hu- 
man psyche. In every fairy tale, to quote 
from a previous contribution: 1 "We move 
in a world of supernatural activities, witches 
and ghosts, exaggerated and heroic deeds, 
even at times emotionless murders, a 
mechanism identical with dreaming." 

ilsador H. Coriat— "The Hysteria of Lady Macbeth," 
second edition, 1920. 

[194] 



A FAIRY TALE 

In fairy tales, as in the world of dreams, 
there emerge in a symbolized form, for sym- 
bolism is the real language of the uncon- 
scious, the thoughts and actions which are 
found only in the childhood of the individual 
or in the infancy of the race. As stated by 
Freud: "The research into these con- 
cepts of folk psychology is at present not by 
any means concluded, but it is apparent 
everywhere, from myths, for instance, that 
they correspond to the displaced residues of 
wish phantasies of entire nations, the dreams 
of ages of young humanity." 

It is for this reason that children revel 
in fairy tales, for they find there portrayed 
the world of the emergence of their con- 
scious thoughts and wishes. Adults likewise 
delight in reading fairy tales, for in them 
the adult regresses in his own unconscious 
to the golden age of childhood. Because 
a child's wishes are fulfilled almost immedi- 
ately by parents, nurse or admiring rela- 

[195] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

tions, as a result of his behavior, his mimic 
expressions or gestures, the child lives in 
that happy world of supreme omnipotence 
which forms the basis and the wish-structure 
of all fairy tales. Out of this omnipotence, 
this thought that he is possessed of illimit- 
able capacity for having every wish fulfilled, 
the child actually thinks that he is possessed, 
not only of magic thoughts and magic words, 
but also of magic deeds. As the child 
grows older and comes into more immediate 
contact with adult reality and the world 
about him, these omnipotent feelings are 
repressed in the unconscious, to reappear 
only in a symbolized form in dreams or in 
the artistic structure of fairy tales. All 
fairy tales portray the various efforts of the 
adult mind to become reconciled to the irra- 
tional and immediately fulfilled wishes of 
childhood and consequently all fairy tales 
have the childhood feelings of omnipotence 
for their central theme. In every fairy tale 

[196] 



A FAIRY TALE 

the wish motive is not only very potent, but 
also very omnipotent. The hero like the 
imaginative mind of the child is endowed 
with magical power; space and time no 
longer exist for him ; the omnipotence of his 
thoughts leads to the omnipotence of his 
deeds. 

Consequently in jvery fairy tale all im- 
pediments of space, time, poverty, love, 
social position, are swept aside in the multi- 
tudinous adventures of the omnipotent hero. 
Fairy tales are variants of the unconscious 
conflicts concerning the so-called family ro- 
mance which takes place in the psyche of 
every developing child, such as emotionless 
murders and the various symbolisms and 
images of the sex motive. 

I can refer particularly in this connection 
to certain fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, 
such as "Frog King," or "Little Snow 
White.'' In the latter tale in the birth of 
the little daughter to Snow White after she 

[197] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

had pricked her finger and drops of blood 
fell from it, from which the daughter was 
born, the sexual symbolism and wish fulfill- 
ment are very clear, likewise the condensa- 
tion of the name and physical appearance of 
Snow White, a condensation so characteris- 
tic of dreams. 

The story goes on to relate: "While sew- 
ing, and looking every moment at the fall- 
ing snow, she (the Queen) pricked her fin- 
gen and three drops of blood fell on it. She 
thought the red color looked so pretty on the 
white snow that she exclaimed — 'Ah! if only 
I had a dear little child as white as snow, 
as red as blood, and as black as ebony!' 
Very soon after this she really had a little 
daughter, who was as white as snow, for she 
was fair ; as red as blood, for her cheeks were 
rosy; and as black as ebony, for her hair and 
eyes were black, and she was called Little 
Snow White; but when the child was born 
the Queen died." 

[198] 



A FAIRY TALE 

As stated by Riklin: 1 "It is surprising 
how great a role the sexual plays in the 
fairy tale and how great is the agreement 
of the sexual symbolism with that of dreams 
and psychopathology. When one realizes 
and admits, however, that the sexuality, be- 
sides hunger and the social factors, plays a 
leading role in life and constantly influences 
our thoughts and actions from youth up, then 
it does not appear in any way surprising, 
although the fairy tale appears to us in a 
new, less child-like garb. They lose on that 
account none of their charm and power of 
attraction." 

A fairy tale then is a day dream of child- 
hood projected into a literary or artistic 
form. The makers of fairy tales possessed 
to a high degree that ability to carry on to 
adult life, without any great amount of re- 
pression into the unconscious, the day 
dreams gathered from their own childhood. 

i Franz Riklin — <r Wish Fulfillment and Symbolism in 
Fairy Tales." 

[199] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

The ordinary individual does not possess 
this ability, or only to a limited extent and 
then it appears only when the censorship 
of repression is removed or is at its lowest 
ebb, namely, in sleep and in the world of 
dreams. 

Very rarely, however, during the course of 
a psychoanalysis, does one meet with a 
dream which in every essential and detail is 
a fairy tale. Such dreams can be termed 
fairy tales from the unconscious. When 
such a type of dream occurs, it represents a 
bursting through into the dream life of all 
the ideas of omnipotence which possessed 
childhood. They are real fairy tales 
elaborated in the form of night dreams di- 
rectly from the unconscious of the dreamer, 
instead of the childhood unconscious being 
tapped by the creative artist in his day- 
dreams. In addition even these day-dreams 
may show the omnipotent ideas which are 
so recurrent in fairy tales. Fairy tales rep- 

[200] 



A FAIRY TALE 

resent that period of childhood which has 
been repressed, the period of magic thoughts 
and deeds. 

As Ferenczi so well states — * "The im- 
petuous curiosity to know everything, that 
has just seduced me into enchanted vistas of 
the past, and led me to bridge over the yet 
unknowable by the help of analysis, brings 
me back to the starting point of these con- 
siderations : to the theme of the acme and de- 
cline of the feeling of impotence. Science 
has to repudiate this illusion, or at least al- 
ways to know when she is entering the field 
of hypotheses and fancies. In fairy tales, 
on the contrary, phantasies of omnipotence 
are and remain the dominating ones. Just 
when we have most humbly to bow before the 
forces of nature, the fairy tale comes to our 
aid with its typical motives. In reality we 
are weak, hence the heroes of fairy tales are 

i S. Ferenczi — "Contributions to Psychoanalysis" — Chap- 
ter VIII (Stages in the Development of the Sens* of 
Reality). 

[201] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

strong and unconquerable: in our activities 
and our knowledge we are cramped and 
hindered by time and space, hence in fairy 
tales one is immortal, is in a hundred places 
at the same time, sees into the future and 
knows the past. The ponderousness, the 
solidity, and the impenetrability of matter, 
obstruct our way every moment ; in the fairy 
tale, however, man has wings, his eye pierces 
the walls, his magic wand opens all doors. 
Reality is a hard fight for existence; in the 
fairy tale the words 'little table spread' are 
sufficient. A man may live in perpetual 
fear of attacks from dangerous beasts and 
fierce foes : in the fairy tale a magic cap en- 
ables every transformation and makes us in- 
accessible. How hard it is in reality to at- 
tain love that can fulfill all our wishes! In 
the fairy tale the hero is irresistible or he 
bewitches with a magic gesture. Thus the 
fairy tale through which grown ups are so 
fond of relating to their children their own 

[202] 



A FAIRY TALE 

unfulfilled and repressed wishes really 
brings the perfected situation of omnipo- 
tence to a last, artistic presentation." 

The fairy tale is then really an imaginary 
compensation for feelings of inferiority and 
mental and physical limitations, it is an out- 
ward projection in artistic garb of repressed 
wishes carried over from childhood. These 
wishes are repressed, because as adult de- 
velopment proceeded, such wishes came into 
conflict with the actual world of reality and 
could only be imaginatively realized and ful- 
filled in the form of an artistic creation. 
That the fairy tale is like a dream is shown 
by the various dream mechanisms which 
enter into its construction, such as the oft 
recurring motives of condensation and dis- 
placement, of dramatization and secondary 
elaboration, of reenforcement of the primary 
wish by a series of heroic deeds and finally of 
the struggle with obstacles, such as so often 
occurs in anxiety dreams. 

[203] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

It has been pointed out by both Freud and 
Brill that fairy tales may act as determi- 
nants or instigators not only of dreams and 
of neurotic symptoms, but likewise play a 
part in the symbolic manifestations of vari- 
ous mental diseases, particularly dementia 
preecox. 1 It is not, however, proposed to 
discuss this aspect here beyond relating the 
fragment of a dream occurring in a case of 
anxiety hysteria, which portrayed in a 
veiled symbolic manner the sadistic Blue 
Beard motive, showing that the unconscious 
of the ancient folk lore maker and of the 
modern dreamer were identical. 

In this dream she started to explore a 
room which she had discovered at the fur- 
ther end of a long gallery. The door was 
marked "Holy of Holies" in small gilt let- 
ters just under the key-hole and in spite of 
a horrified protest from her mother she 

i A. A. Brill — "Fairy Tales as Determinants of Dreams 
and Neurotic Symptoms" — New York Medieal JowtmlI — 
March 91, 1914. 

[204] 



A FAIRY TALE 

opened the door and found in the room only 
a cedar chest containing ceremonial robes. 

In this case there occurs the motive of the 
locked and forbidden room which is so often 
encountered in folk lore, as in the story of 
Blue Beard with its sadistic episodes. It 
symbolizes a forbidden erotic and uncon- 
scious wish carried over from childhood and 
reenforced in her adult life by the inscrip- 
tion over the key hole in the manifest con- 
tent of the dream. 

Such an interesting and apparently 
logical fairy tale dream is the following, 
taken from the case of a young man who 
suffered from an anxiety neurosis associated 
with a conflict of strong feelings of mental 
and physical inferiority. A searching 
analysis failed to disclose, even in his early 
childhood, that the patient had ever read or 
heard of a similar fairy tale, although it 
must be admitted, that there may have 
been a childhood amnesia for this particular 

[205] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

point which could not be overcome even by 
the technical methods of the psychoanalysis. 
In this case, there was no literal carrying 
over into adult life of the omnipotence of 
fairy tale heroes, it was rather an attempt at 
compensation for the personal feelings of 
inferiority, using the same unconscious 
symbolic thinking out of which actual fairy 
tales are created. Of course the dream as 
related is only its manifest content. Its in- 
terpretation and symbolism can be under- 
stood only by analyzing the web of the 
dream thoughts, the latent content of the 
dream. 

He seemed to be a frozen sea or large 
lake and his country was at war with another 
country. The enemy army was encamping 
on the ice. He was lying wounded under 
a bridge, dressed not in a soldier's uniform, 
but in his ordinary civilian clothes. Some of 
the enemy soldiers were at a distance watch- 
ing him to see if he were dead or alive. 

[206] 



A FAIRY TALE 

First he made a slight movement, and as he 
did so he felt a heavy blow on the head from 
the butt of a rifle. In the dream he became 
unconscious and when he regained conscious- 
ness again, the enemy soldiers had disap- 
peared from his immediate vicinity. Then 
he crawled on his hands and knees to a small 
cottage. In the cottage he found his 
mother, who bandaged his head. Following 
this, he dressed himself in a bullet-proof sol- 
dier's uniform, which seemed inflated with 
air and made him appear large and bulky. 

He then crept slowly towards the enemy 
lines and there found the King of his coun- 
try. He said to the King without the slight- 
est resistance or embarrassment — "On which 
side are you?" and the King replied that he 
was helping the enemy. Then he became 
very angry with the King, but without re- 
plying, he walked a little further on the ice 
and pulled a large diamond cutter about 
three feet long out of his pocket. Then with 

[207] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

lightning like rapidity he walked across the 
frozen sea, cutting the ice with the diamond 
cutter. The enemy soldiers saw him and 
shot at him and although he was struck a 
number of times, he remained unwounded 
on account of his bullet-proof suit. He con- 
tinued cutting the ice, the enemy still pur- 
sued him and continued to fire, but he man- 
aged to out-distance them on account of his 
extraordinary ability for rapid movements. 
As the pursuing army approached they 
stepped on the ice which he had cut, fell into 
the sea and all were drowned. 

The entire dream was very vivid and in his 
capacity as hero who was possessed of the 
ability for rapid movement and who was 
invulnerable to wounds like Achilles, he 
completely compensated for his feelings of 
inferiority. He felt, too, on a social equal 
with Kings in his attitude towards the King 
of his country, although the King at the 
same time, as so often occurs in psycho- 

[208] 



A FAIRY TALE 

analysis, probably represented his physician. 
In this case the dream uncovered a trans- 
ference, here symbolized as a sort of wish 
or striving to be the equal of his physician. 
In the dream, also, there occurred sort of a 
rebirth symbolization : his mother bound up 
his wounds : gave him life again, in the same 
way she once gave him life at his birth. 
This is really an CEdipus-saving fantasy — 
a symbolic portrayal of birth by the deed of 
saving life. The rebirth is also symbolized 
by the crawling into the cottage, helpless, 
like a child ; there finding his mother, nursed 
by her and emerging strong, swift and in- 
vulnerable. The symbolism here involved 
may also be a form of introversion leading to 
the mother imago, because in introversion he 
retreats from reality and thus protects his 
inferiority feelings. This rebirth symboli- 
zation enters to a larger extent not only in 
the tales of heroes, but also in religious cere- 
monials and various religious cults, princi- 

[209] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

pally to the pagan deities. The phallic mo- 
tive and symbolism, represented by the ex- 
aggeration and dream over-determination of 
the diamond cutter is significant. It is 
analogous to the mystic and symbolic phal- 
lic worship of the ancients, where images of 
a movable phallus of enormous magnitude 
were carried in certain sacred processions. 1 
It demonstrates how the unconscious dream- 
work may utilize the same primitive 
thought-symbolism as the unconscious of so- 
ciety. Sexual symbolism is very complex 
and varied and is expressed in the language 
of the unconscious of mankind rather than 
that of individual men. When it is further- 
more stated that the diamond cutter also rep- 
resented the powerful omnipotent wish-ful- 
filling fairy wand, the importance of its sym- 
bolism is very significant. 

Thus the dream is a symbolized fragment 
of his childhood unconscious, a sort of a 

1 See Richard P. Knight — "The Symbolical Language of 
Ancient Art and Mythology." 

[210] 



A FAIRY TALE 

break with reality and a regression to the 
magic fairy land of his childhood. This re- 
pressed feeling of omnipotence had long 
lain dormant in the unconscious of the 
dreamer and only emerged during the pro- 
cess of psychoanalytic treatment. Its value 
lay in the contrast shown him between his 
conscious feelings of inferiority and in the 
latent omnipotent powers which slumbered 
in his unconscious. Consequently the analy- 
sis released the repressed omnipotence, sym- 
bolized it like a fairy tale and made it avail- 
able for the first time to the dreamer as a 
corrective to his character formation of in- 
feriority. It neutralized and finally over- 
came the inferiority feeling by a substitution 
of his unconscious latent powers for his con- 
scious inferiority complex. 

The social and constructive value to the 
dreamer of the analysis of such a dream is 
therefore enormous, enabling him to utilize 
for the first time in his life his dormant 

[211] 



REPRESSED EMOTIONS 

powers of overcoming the chief obstacle of 
his life, the feeling of mental and physical in* 
feriority. 

Such dreams although absurd and fanciful 
in the surface, are of great value in under- 
standing the development of character. 
When analyzed they are of great importance 
in providing a release for dormant activi- 
ties. Thus psychoanalysis in removing re- 
pressions, in making them clear and mani- 
fest to conscious thinking is an activator of 
the repressed motives and wishes of human 
life, and although human emotions cannot 
be changed, those emotions which impede 
one in the conflicts with the realities of life, 
can be better understood, better combated 
and consequently better utilized in the 
struggle for existence, through psychoanaly- 
sis. This dream represents, in its manifest 
content at least, an effort to solve the prob- 
lem of inferiority and for this purpose it 
descends to a deeper layer of the uncon- 

[212] 



A FAIRY TALE 

scious, that portion made up of the repressed 
omnipotent wishes of childhood, which in 
adult existence, he was unable to fulfill in his 
waking life. The childhood wishes really 
form the motive force and symbolism of the 
dream and it is in this deeper stratum tapped 
by the psychoanalytic treatment, that the so- 
lution of the dreamer's characterological de- 
fects lay. When the dreamer awoke, the 
world of reality again enveloped him and he 
became the inferior human being once more. 
The value of the analysis of this particular 
dream lay in the fact that it gave the dreamer 
an insight into his latent possibilities and 
prepared him for readjustment in the 
struggle for existence. The work of the 
unconscious as revealed in the analysis of the 
dream has released to consciousness, al- 
though only in the form of dream wishes, the 
energy and knowledge necessary to over- 
come the feeling of inferiority. 

[213] 



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